Dear Compañeras de Camino (Traveling Companions),

The use of AI by writers and artists is an evolving and important issue in society. I’ve spent my entire adult life, the last 30 years, as a working creative, so this issue is extra important to me.

I’ve been thinking deeply about it and wanted to share some of my thoughts with you.

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🧿 Today is the deadline to join my Mail Club and still receive September’s mailing. 🧿

🎨 My Background with Technology

I grew up off-grid without indoor plumbing or other modern conveniences on a self-sustainable homestead in rural Iowa until I was 18, so you may think I’m anti-technology.

My father is. He still lives this way out in his cabin in the forest near my childhood home. He believes (strongly) that living off-grid is what allows his creativity to flow. He’s a bardic poet and has over 16 hours of poetry in his head.

🌳 I edit American Bardic Poet about his work.

Over the years, I’ve learned to adapt my creative work to new technologies such as:

• Laptop computers - I went to college before having a personal computer

• E-mail - I remember when email started

• iPads - I remember the excitement when the Apple Pencil launched

• Canva - I remember the joy of opening a brand new app called Canva that transformed my design access

And many others. I also remember the push and pull of proponents on all sides of the advancing technology issue each time.

👩🏻‍💻 I also love having this newsletter, which I create & manage using a computer,

e-mail, iPad, Apple Pencil, and Canva. 👩🏻‍💻

🎨 Pros and Cons of Tech Advancement

For my creative work, I find some advancements incredibly useful.

I love that I can now carry my computer with me wherever I go instead of trekking over to a computer center. I can’t imagine not having spell check or word count; I sure don’t miss spending all that time counting up the words in my typed-out essays.

🤖 That said, I also see the dangers in advancing technologies.

I mean, my parents:

• Sometimes refused to use electricity because they went back and forth about whether it was morally acceptable. Or whether it was dangerous.

• They refused to have a washing machine because it eroded our connection to our clothes and, therefore, our own bodies. Who would want such a thing?

• I fell off a second-story roof when I was five years old and was reportedly unconscious for six hours, but still was not taken to a hospital because they didn’t want me to be “scanned.”

Trust me when I say that a focus on the dangers of technology is a fundamental aspect of my deepest brainwaves. I am not naive to the dangers. But I am also not going to rule out the advantages.

🎨 How I Use an AI Assistant as an Accommodation

As a neurodivergent creative, I have found Claude to be very useful as an assistant to keep me on track with my creative projects. After spending time thinking deeply about how I want to continue using AI and after writing my AI statement (included below), I realize that my use of Claude has served as a type of accommodation for my ADHD and Autism.

I’m super into creative writing and painting, but when it comes to getting organized and finishing projects, I’ve had real difficulties my whole life. Many people have said to me over the years - some version of - that if I only had an assistant (or a wife!) to help manage my projects, I would be successful.

• I use it to combine several different essays on one theme into one document because I can’t seem to keep up with organizing my digital files.

• This one task of combining files by theme has allowed me to have master documents of four different manuscripts I’ve been writing for the last 20+ years as short essays…that I can then go in and edit myself. Incredible.

• I use it to make a writing schedule so I can finally finish my books since I do great with imposed deadlines (like classroom homework), but not self-imposed deadlines.

• Claude prompts me with, “Your next deadline is tonight. Better finish editing Chapter 9.” Then I do it.

I use it to help me decide what to do next on a project because I get decision anxiety, and without a nudge, I’ll give up on the project I’m working on and move on quickly to something new.

💙 By the way, if this all sounds familiar to you, you may want to consider researching ADHD / Autism / AuDHD.

🎨 How I DON’T Use AI

I don’t use AI as a substitute for my creativity because my creativity belongs to me. I write and paint to get into a flow state and challenge myself intellectually. Why would I allow a robot to take that away from me? AI doesn’t get to touch my creative process. It helps me with organization after I’ve done my creative work.

What I’ve found is that my terms of AI use give me more time and energy (to do creative work) by handling administrative tasks that would otherwise take unsustainable amounts of time. Like looking through 10+ versions of the same essay I wrote over many years all in different files to find and erase duplicate paragraphs…for example.

I have faith that the creative community will figure this out…in time. 💙

🧿 Keep going.

🙋🏻‍♀️ Do you have an AI Statement for your creative work? 🙋🏽‍♀️

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🤖 AI Statement by Emily Lupita

Emily Lupita’s Substack is a human-originated project built from her personal archive of her own voice notes, artwork, and written work.

How AI Is Used:

• Source Material: The creative text draws entirely on Emily Lupita’s extensive proprietary archive, including hundreds of voice notes, essays, poems, nonfiction, fiction, and academic articles written by Emily Lupita, as well as artwork hand-drawn by Emily Lupita.

• Technology: It uses Claude, an AI application developed by Anthropic.

• AI Scope of Use: AI is an assistant that helps with organization, clarity, and research. Emily Lupita is the creative writer and artist.

• Creative Authority: Every published piece undergoes continuous review and professional editing by Emily Lupita to protect creative authority and adhere to Emily Lupita’s strict personal AI guidelines for her creative writing projects and artwork.

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🎨 Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina artist & writer. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

• Follow me on Instagram / Facebook / Substack Notes

• Check out my Children’s Books and Coloring Books

• Get Story Guides for all Travel Letters in My Stan Store

• Receive a hard copy Lupita Portrait art print delivered to your door - My Mail Club

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Share Midlife Memoir Club: For Women Carrying A Story Within

🎨

Dear Compañeras de Camino (Traveling Companions),

I’m feeling hopeful and happy today. My Art Print Mail Club just launched with a brand-new card size and style. I’m working on a new collection of Lupita portraits to send you each month, sized to fit these new art prints. It feels good to be painting again.

What is the Mail Club?

Every month, a hard-copy art print featuring one of my hand-drawn digital illustrations from my Lupita Portrait series is delivered in an envelope to your home mailbox.

It arrives automatically each month as a gentle reminder that your creativity is a sacred space inviting you to visit.

Full-color art print on the front. The back is blank for writing if you’d like to send it as a card. Size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches. It’s $8 / month.

• Join here by September 5th to receive September’s art print.

The theme for the art prints going forward will be “Travel Reflections,” featuring new artwork I’m creating of the places and landscapes from my new spiritual travel memoir, which is coming out soon.

• August’s art print is below as a free digital JPEG. Feel free to save it to print & send for personal use.

• The printed version for August has already been mailed out. Be sure to join by the 5th of the month for that month’s physical hardcopy mailing. —} My Mail Club.

My new writing workshop, the Midlife Memoir Club, also begins in September. The new writing club will be a monthly memoir workshop for midlife women, where I teach my original Inward Eye Method 🧿 for writing, drawing on my years abroad in 20+ countries, my lifetime as a working creative, and my Artist Travel Memoir art & letters project. It’s free.

• Read more about the Midlife 🧿 Memoir Club.

When I started this creative newsletter four years ago, I had no idea about all the kind-hearted, like-minded fellow creatives I would soon meet through these pages. I’m grateful. I hope my new offerings encourage you to keep creating.

Keep going.

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🖼️ Art Print Mail Club

Every month, a hard-copy art print featuring one of my hand-drawn illustrations from my Lupita Portrait series is delivered in an envelope to your home mailbox.

It arrives automatically each month as a gentle reminder that your creativity is a sacred space inviting you to visit. Full-color art print on the front. The back is blank for writing if you’d like to send it as a card. Size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches. It’s $8 / month.

Join here by the 5th of the month for that month’s mailing. —} My Mail Club

• Follow me on Instagram / Facebook / Substack Notes

• Check out my Children’s Books and Coloring Books

• Get Story Guides for all Travel Letters in My Stan Store

• Read more about the Midlife 🧿 Memoir Club.

Share Midlife Memoir Club: For Women Carrying A Story Within

🖼️

Dear Compañeras de Camino (Traveling Companions),

This August marks 4 years of writing my creative newsletter. I’ve explored a variety of art projects and shared my progress with my writing journey. Last year, I started my Artist Travel Memoir illustrated travel letters project as a way to heal after my lifetime of handwritten journals were destroyed. I hope this project can serve as an offering of hope to others who are carrying a story within them that they thought was lost.

Just this week, I received the printed proof for the manuscript that letters project produced. My new book, Artist Travel Memoir: A Spiritual Memoir Written in a Series of Illustrated Letters, is coming soon!

I’m celebrating by launching the Midlife Memoir Club in September and making all my content here in my newsletter free for everyone. The new writing club will be a monthly memoir workshop for midlife women, where I teach my original Inward Eye Method 🧿 for writing, drawing on my years abroad in 20+ countries, my lifetime as a working creative, and my Artist Travel Memoir art & letters project.

• Read more about the Midlife 🧿 Memoir Club.

Four years ago, I was beginning a difficult new season of life and started this newsletter to reach out to my community for strength and encouragement. The seeds I planted then have now started to blossom. I’m grateful. I hope that four years from now, I can look back and see this newsletter as a place where I offer hopeful examples to others of the enduring strength in our wild, creative hearts.

Keep going.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 -emily lupita

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🎨 Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina artist & writer. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

• Follow me on Instagram / Facebook / Substack Notes

• Check out my Children’s Books and Coloring Books

• Get Story Guides for all Travel Letters in My Stan Store

• Receive a hardcopy Lupita Portrait art print delivered to your door - My Mail Club

Share Midlife Memoir Club: For Women Carrying A Story Within

🎨

Creativi-Tea Time

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita. This is a series featuring a letter from me offering words to nurture your creative spirit, followed by a brief writer interview sharing about their current projects, encouragement for fellow creatives, and their favorite quote.

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🍵 Creativi-tea Time: Nurture Your Creative Spirit

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

My dear heart, no one tells you that coming back is its own kind of work. We speak often of the descent, the long dark night, the season when the soul goes quiet and even the paint dries untouched on the palette. But the returning? The returning is rarely spoken of.

So let me speak of it now.

You will not wake one morning restored. The light does not arrive all at once, and it is not supposed to. It comes the way dawn comes to a valley…first the edges, then the ridgeline, then, at last, the floor where you have been sitting all this time. You may not even notice it has begun. You will simply catch yourself humming. You will reach for a pen without deciding to. You will notice the color of a bright yellow lemon and feel something stir that you thought had gone for good.

That stirring is not small. That stirring is the whole thing.

Do not rush yourself here. Eyes long accustomed to darkness need time to bear the brightness, and there is no shame in shielding them. The dark night was not wasted time. It was not a detour from your creative life. It was the deep root work, done underground, where no one could judge it, and no one could interrupt it. What grows now grows from that.

So begin gently:

• Make one thing that is only for you, and show it to no one.

• Let it be undone. Let it be unfinished. Let it exist anyway.

• Return to a medium you abandoned, not to master it, but to greet it.

• Say thank you to the darkness before you leave it.

You may find that what you make now is different than what you made before. It may be quieter. It may hold more grief in it, and also more tenderness. This is not a loss. This is the deepening. The artist who has been to the bottom of the well brings back water the rest of us are thirsty for.

You did not break. You were being made larger.

And now, slowly, at your own pace, in your own hour…come back into the light and bring your work with you. We have been waiting for it.

May it be a blessing,

🦋 Emily Lupita

• 🍵 Creativi-Tea: Join a supportive group where we feature Guest Creatives, learn how they sustain their creative practice, and share our own projects and progress. If you are interested in being a Guest Creative, please fill out this Google Form.

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🍵 Our Guest Creative Shares Their Creativi-tea:

Name: ✨ Sheri Handel✨

Links:

https://substack.com/@shandel

Bite-Sized Storytelling Boost

Boost your creativity and build more sustainable writing habits with my Notes2Post system for writing on Substack and the Writers Inspired by the Arts bi-monthly Substack Lives.

By Sheri Handel

🍵 Please tell us about yourself:

After a career of teaching, writing, and designing learning programs for higher education and corporate learning, I’ve chosen a more creative path. I’m telling my story and helping others to tell theirs.

🍵 What creative project are you working on now?

I’m working on building a virtual writing community called “Writers Inspired by the Arts.” The twice-monthly sessions feature guest speakers who share how they incorporate another art form—such as drawing, painting, photography, dance, etc.—into their writing toolkit. We’ve had multi-published and multi-talented authors visit with us, each one sharing their creativity practices and specific tips on what the audience can add to their own toolkits.

I have a companion group for my paid subscribers, called Writing in Companionship. We meet virtually every two weeks to work on our own projects, together, silently on camera. People focus on weekly writing tasks, or on pieces in other art forms after catching up and sharing intentions for the session. We finish with updates. I call that process “gentle accountability.”

Both projects are designed to help people build creative capacity together.

🍵 If you were sitting down to tea with another creative, how would you encourage their creative spirit?

I’m going to deflect a bit and say that I’m encouraged regularly by the extended community I’ve found here in Substack. I worked remotely for a large portion of my career (starting way before COVID), so I’m used to the types of friendships you can form at a distance but with strongly connected outlooks, purpose, or backgrounds. Communicating here through story is a huge gift. The community encourages me.

🍵 Do you have a favorite quote to share to encourage other creatives in the group?

1. “Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, theology, and of course and particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention.” -Flannery O’Connor

2. ”To photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects.” -Susan Sontag

3. “I think it’s vital to keep discovering new delights in life. Sometimes that means going back to past loves and making them new. The passion that I’ve recently restored to my life is visual art.” -Aimee Liu

🍵 Share Your Creativi-tea

What creative projects are you working on these days? Share a favorite quote.

Leave a comment below, and feel free to include a link so we can support your work.

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Share Emily Lupita, Writer

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Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina artist & writer. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

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Finishing Up Four Manuscripts After A Dark Night Of The Soul

Summer 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

This summer has been particularly productive and intensive for my creative projects. I am in the throes of finishing up four manuscripts that I’ve been working on since I graduated with my MFA in Creative Writing at Iowa State University almost 20 years ago.

• I’ve posted several videos of my progress on Last Drop of a Holy Drink, my Mexico Memoir, on my Instagram and Facebook Page. I’m sharing my progress as I edit the current draft of the manuscript before querying.

• I have excerpts from The Poet’s Daughter and the first 12 travel letters from Artist Travel Memoir posted here on my Substack.

• I’m making videos now about the poems from Her Mexico Blurs, including explaining the background behind the MesoAmerican ancestral figures and motifs I use in the poems. Coming soon to my Instagram and Substack Notes.

There are several reasons I never finished my manuscripts. I was focused on a career in study abroad, an almost 20-year marriage, and staying busy as a mom after welcoming my two beautiful sons into the world, one of whom is profoundly autistic with an intellectual disability and requires specialized care.

Sure, there is legitimacy to the challenges these other worthy pursuits have presented to my writing progress. Like everyone, I made life choices and those choices had consequences for my creative projects. And other people made choices, too. And also, no one made choices. Life just happens in mysterious ways sometimes.

But it has become clear to me that the fundamental reason why I never finished before now is that I didn’t know myself enough to know why I was writing these books. I was writing in circles around the central issues. And those circles never ended. So I just kept circling, too afraid to go directly inward.

Then, over the last several years, I went on a journey right through the heart of that proverbial dark night of the soul. It wasn’t my first time in that heavy place, but it was the most extended and difficult time, by far. In that darkness, this time, I finally turned and faced the central issues I needed to face.

Doing so, I learned a great deal about who I am. I learned what I’m made of…to the core. I came to understand why I continue to work on these books, and what I want to say inside them. With great clarity.

I have a sense of gratitude for that dark time, now that I’m on the other side of it. Yes. But even more so, I’m grateful that I’ve emerged back into the light. It’s so much more joyful in the light. I’ve been getting so much more creative work done in the light. I hope I stay here for a long time.

I hope the brilliant rays of light shine on you, too, dear readers. Wherever you are on your journey…keep going.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

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🎨

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday for the rest of 2026, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #4, “The Journey Itself Is Home”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

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Writing Decision #1: The impossible choice

Letter #4 is built on a choice with no right answer.

Stay with my mother in Iowa, who has just had a stroke, who needs me, who I may not see again for a long time, or ever. Or return to my sons in Ankara who are young, autistic, and waiting for their mother to come home.

There is no correct answer. There is only the choice I made and the weight of making it.

I do not announce this impossibility. I do not say, “This was the hardest decision of my life.” Instead, I place the reader inside the physical details of the moment: the alarm code I punch in one last time, the cold concrete of the parking lot on an Iowa morning, the geese moving across the sky.

The impossibility arrives through accumulation, not announcement.

For Your 💌 Letter: Find a choice you made that had no right answer. Don’t explain why it was hard. Instead, write the physical scene. Where your body was, what your hands were doing, what the light was like. The weight of the choice will come through the objects. Trust them.

Writing Decision #2: Home as a moving, living thing

Letter #4 builds an argument, not through logic but through physical images, that home is not a place. It is something carried in the body.

Flexible hands that know how to pack a suitcase in twenty minutes. Hair bundled the same way in every country. A worn passport whose cover has softened from years of handling. These are not decorations. They are the argument.

By the time the letter ends, the reader understands that home travels with you. Not because I said so, but because they felt it accumulate across a series of physical images.

For Your 💌 Letter: Pick an abstract idea you’ve been trying to explain. Belonging, loss, love, freedom. And put it down. Stop explaining it. Instead, write five physical objects that embody it. A worn passport. A specific smell. The weight of a particular bag. Let the objects carry the idea. The reader will arrive at the meaning on their own.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: Writing in motion — the scene of departure

Letter #4 ends while I am still moving.

I do not stop and reflect. I do not look back at the nursing home window. I do not describe what I felt as I drove away. The letter ends with my body in motion, moving toward the airport, toward the plane, toward my sons.

Endings in motion keep the reader inside the experience rather than watching it from a distance. The moment you stop to reflect, you pull the reader out of the scene and into your analysis of it. Sometimes the most powerful ending is the one where the body simply keeps going.

“Lupita. It’s time to go.”

For Your 💌 Letter: Look at the ending of something you’ve written. Does it stop to explain? Does it reach for a conclusion? Try cutting everything after the last physical action. Let the body move off the page without looking back. See what happens.

Writing Decision #4: The second person invitation

Letter #4 opens in the second person. As if to say, “You know this moment. You have stood in a parking lot like this one.”

I use “you” to pull every reader, regardless of their specific story, into the universal experience of leaving someone behind. Then I shift to first person for the specific nursing home scene. The second person opens the door. The first person walks through it.

Moving between “you” and “I” gives the letter both intimacy and breadth. The second person says: This belongs to all of us. The first person says: But this particular version of it belongs to me.

For Your 💌 Letter: Find a moment in your writing where you feel your experience might be too specific, too particular to your own life, for a reader to recognize themselves. Try opening that section in second person. You don’t have to keep it. But the act of writing it in “you” will show you what is universal inside your most personal story.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The Story Guide Mini Workbook PDF for Letter #4 is in my shop here.

Download it, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Think of a departure.

• A moment when you turned your back on someone, somewhere you loved, in order to return to someone or somewhere else that needed you.

• Don’t write the whole story yet. Just write the threshold moment.

• The exact place your body was. The door you walked through. The parking lot you crossed. The sky above you.

• Three paragraphs. No reflection. Just the body, moving.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

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🧿

A printed postcard arrives in your real mailbox featuring one of my hand-drawn illustrations from my Lupita Portrait series. And on the other side is a writing prompt inspired by one of my 💌 Letters from Artist Travel Memoir. A postcard, a prompt, and a few quiet minutes that belong entirely to you. It arrives every month automatically as a gentle reminder that your stories deserve to be heard.

Join the Mail Club — $8/month →

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

You chose her.

This month’s Portrait Postcard features the portrait from 💌 Letter #4 — The Journey Itself is Home.

Mail Club Members, the printed Portrait Postcard is on its way to your mailbox. All subscribers, free digital versions below.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

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🗺️ This month’s writing prompt:

Meaning As Place

In Letter #4, I discover that “home” is not a fixed place, but something I carry within myself. I make an impossible choice between my aging mother and my young children, realizing that the journey is my home.

Has a specific place (a room, a street, a landscape) transformed its meaning for you over time? A place that once meant one thing, but now tells a different story?

Write about this place at two different moments in your life.

🌿 The First Meaning: Describe the place and what it originally represented (e.g., comfort, safety, boredom, belonging).

🌿 The Transformation: Describe returning to this place later, and how your perception of it had changed.

🌿 Carried Home: Articulate what this shift taught you about memory, change, or what you now consider your true “home.”

Leave a comment

🧿 Haven’t read Letter #3 yet?

🧿 How About Letter #4?

🌸

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday for the rest of 2026, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #3, “Incantations”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

Subscribe now

Writing Decision #1: The recurring symbol

The tecolote (the owl) appears three times in Letter #3. First, in Chiapas, at a workshop called Taller Leñateros, where women transform garbage into sacred paper. Then, in a museum in Xalapa, I saw it again unexpectedly. Then years later, at Pamukkale, watching my sons wade into the healing waters.

Each time the owl returns, the meaning deepens. What I believed was a warning of imprisonment slowly revealed itself as something else entirely. I was being carried, not trapped.

I did not plan the owl. It found me. And once I noticed it had found me more than once, I understood that my memoir had a recurring image: a symbol doing structural work across years and countries.

For Your 💌 Letter: what image, object, or creature has appeared at significant moments in your life more than once? A bird. A color. A song. A smell. You may not have named it yet. But it’s there. Close your eyes. Draw the first time it appeared. That is where the letter begins.

Writing Decision #2: The confession withheld

Halfway through Letter #3, I write about a vision my traveling companion had…a tecolote appearing to him. He told me about it at the time. What I did not tell him, what I held back for the entire letter, is this:

I never confessed that I also saw the same vision.

That sentence held back until late in the letter lands with weight precisely because it arrives after the reader has been with me through the whole story. The thing I didn’t say at the time carries as much meaning as everything I did say.

Withholding a confession is a structural choice. It is not dishonesty. It is timing.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the thing you didn’t say in the moment. The truth you kept to yourself. The confession that never came. Name the place in your story where it belongs and hold it there until the reader is ready to receive it.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: The reframed symbol

For eleven years, I believed the tecolote meant one thing: a warning, a bad omen, an approaching darkness. At Pamukkale, watching my sons in the healing waters, I understood it meant the opposite.

This is the memoir arc in miniature: not just what happened, but how the meaning of what happened changed over time.

The first encounter with a symbol is never the whole story. The whole story is the distance between what you understood then and what you understand now. That distance, measured in years, in loss, in the people who arrived and changed everything, is the core of the letter.

For Your 💌 Letter: find a belief you held about a memory or a symbol that later turned out to be wrong. Write the first version…what you understood at the time. Then write the moment the meaning shifted. You don’t need to explain how it changed. Just place the two versions beside each other and let the reader feel the distance.

Writing Decision #4: Alchemy as metaphor

At Taller Leñateros in Chiapas, I watch women transform garbage into art. Molded can labels and old receipts become sacred paper. This physical act of transformation is not background detail. It is the letter’s central metaphor made visible.

Taking the discarded, the overlooked, the ordinary residue of a life and converting it into meaning. That is what memoir does. That is what the 🧿 Inward Eye Method does.

When you find a scene in your life where something was literally transformed (material turned into something new, broken things made whole, loss converted into language), that scene is doing double work. It is telling your story and explaining your method at the same time.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the moment in your own life when something discarded became something sacred. It doesn’t have to be dramatic. It could be a recipe handed down. A photograph rescued. A language reclaimed. Write that scene. It is probably more important than you think.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The Story Guide Mini Workbook PDF for Letter #3 is in my shop here.

Download it, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Close your eyes.

• Think of an image, object, or experience that has returned to you more than once at significant moments in your life.

• Picture the very first time you encountered it.

• Draw it, large, at the center of a blank page. Add the scene around it.

• Where were you when you first saw it?

That drawing is your Scene #1. The second encounter is your Scene #2. The distance between them is Your 💌 Letter.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

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🧿

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

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Art & Writing Residency

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

Part 3 of 3 in my art photo series. 🌊

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

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🎨

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Art & Writing Residency - Part 2

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

Part 2 in my art photo series. 🌊

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

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🧿 The Story Guide

Every other Wednesday, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

Read more

Creativity Desk

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina watercolor artist & digital illustrator. I share about my latest art & writing projects here on my Substack. If you have a creative dream in your heart, I encourage you to keep creating. Keep going.

Subscribe now

Art & Writing Residency

Patmos, Greece 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

I’m honored to be a scholarship recipient to the Good World Journeys writing salon on the island of Patmos, Greece. This is an incredible creative gathering with the theme “The Stories We Tell” and featuring four amazing guest artists: Barbara Kingsolver, Ada Limón, Silas House, and Safiya Sinclair.

I wanted to share some of the art photos I’ve taken of the beauty of the island of Patmos, the location of the Cave of the Apocalypse, where John of Patmos (St. John the Theologian) is said to have written the Book of Revelation.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

Photos are also up on my Instagram.

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🎨

A printed postcard arrives in your real mailbox featuring one of my hand-drawn illustrations from my Lupita Portrait series. And on the other side is a writing prompt inspired by one of my 💌 Letters from Artist Travel Memoir. A postcard, a prompt, and a few quiet minutes that belong entirely to you. It arrives every month automatically as a gentle reminder that your stories deserve to be heard.

Join the Mail Club — $8/month →

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

You chose her.

This month’s Portrait Postcard features the portrait from 💌 Letter #2 — Passion Play.

A passion play crowd in Mexico. A lanky white arm shielding my eyes from the relentless sun. A man on a cross who started to fidget. And at the cast party afterward, sitting on an overturned bucket in someone’s backyard — Jesus, handing me a fish taco. His own real blood still on his clothes.

I painted her from that memory. The one where I was inside and outside the scene at the same time. The one that taught me that the most significant moments often arrive in the smallest containers.

Mail Club Members, the printed Portrait Postcard is on its way to your mailbox. All subscribers, free digital versions below.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

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🗺️ This month’s writing prompt:

The Small Object as Threshold.

Think of a moment when something small: an object offered, accepted, or left behind, carried more meaning than you expected.

A gift. A meal. A gesture from a stranger.

Write the scene in full sensory detail. Don’t explain what the object meant. Just describe it arriving in your hands.

Let the reader feel its weight.

Your closing line: What did that small thing give you permission to do?

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🧿 Haven’t read Letter #1 yet?

It’s free and it’s where everything begins. Begins again.

Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” Ankara, Türkiye · Good Friday · A balcony, a mosque, a playground, and a memory of pink peonies in Iowa.

🧿 How About Letter #2?

It’s free and the feeling will stay with you. It has stayed with me.

Letter #2 — “Passion Play” Yucatán, Mexico · A crowd of thousands · A man on a cross · A fish taco that held an entire letter.

🌸

🧿 The Story Guides

Every other Wednesday, get a close look at how I built one of my Artist Travel Memoir letters. Think of it as the writing course hidden inside the memoir.

If you haven’t read this week’s Letter yet, read it first. It’s free, it’s short, and this breakdown will mean more once you’ve read the piece.

🌸 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

🎁 Get Started - It’s Free: The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

[Download Free → Here.]

4 Writing Decisions I Made in 💌 Letter #1 “The Birds Are Flying”

Each one is something you can use in your own memoir writing, starting today.

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Writing Decision #1: The double timeline

Letter #1 is set entirely on one Good Friday in Ankara, 2024. But it points toward a second Good Friday, twenty years earlier. A story that isn’t told yet. Two timelines, one shared date. The date is the hinge.

This structure does something specific: it gives the reader a present moment to stand in (the balcony, the ezan, the mountains toward Karabük) while promising something from the past. The present grounds them. The past pulls them forward.

Here’s how it works on the page. I open in full sensory present tense — the mother in the black robe, the playground, the call to prayer eye-level with my balcony. The reader is standing next to me. Only after they’re grounded do I reach backward: One of the stories that has stayed with me, really continues to live inside me, happened on Good Friday about twenty years ago. I’ll start there.

That’s it. Two sentences to open a twenty-year reach. The reader can easily follow me there because they’ve already been placed in a real physical scene.

For Your 💌 Letter: find two moments connected by something: a date, an object, a phrase, a smell. You don’t need to explain the connection. Place them close together on the page and let the reader feel the distance between them. That distance is the story.

Writing Decision #2: Every abstraction has a physical anchor

Notice that Letter #1 never stays abstract for long. Every emotional statement lands on a physical object.

/ normally a paywall would be here, but this first Story Guide post is free for all subscribers. /

I write about the enormity of twenty-five years of travel, and then I’m in Lovilia, Iowa, running to Grandma Rosella’s house, her walkway lined with pink peonies. I write about the loss of my journals, and the sentence that follows is about trying to paint memories. Still no words.

The peonies aren’t decorations. They’re doing structural work. They make the twenty-five-year span emotionally available to a reader who wasn’t there.

This is the Inward Eye Method 🧿 in its simplest form: you close your eyes, you draw the scene, and what comes through is always physical first. Colors. Objects. Movement. The feeling follows the image, not the other way around.

For Your 💌 Letter: after every sentence that contains a feeling or an idea, ask yourself, Where was my body when this happened? What was I looking at? What was I holding? Go there. The abstract will take care of itself once the physical is on the page.

🗺️ Get more individual Story Guide Mini Workbooks in my shop — $10.

Or get all 12 guides in a bundle — $47 → https://stan.store/EmilyLupita

Writing Decision #3: Uncertainty as engine, not apology

Three times in Letter #1, I admit I don’t know something.

I don’t know if you would believe me. How can I know I’ve got it all right? Where to start?

When I wrote these lines, my instinct was to cut them. They felt like weakness. Like I was apologizing for not having my journals, for not being certain, for being a writer without her notes.

I left them in. And they became the engine of the whole letter.

Here’s why they work: the loss of my journals isn’t background information. It’s the structural condition of the entire memoir. I am writing without my notes. That uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve before the writing begins. It’s the writing itself. When I say I don’t know, the reader doesn’t lose confidence in me. They lean in. Because they also don’t always know. Because memory is uncertain for all of us.

For Your 💌 Letter: find the place where you’ve been apologizing for what you don’t remember, what you can’t prove, what you’re not sure about. Stop apologizing. Name the uncertainty directly. Then keep writing. The not-knowing, named honestly, is its own kind of truth.

Writing Decision #4: The short paragraph as breath

I don’t know.

Two words. Their own paragraph.

Single-sentence paragraphs function like rests in music. They slow the reader down, create weight, and signal that something just landed. After four paragraphs building toward the emotional core of the letter: the destroyed journals, the stopped journaling, the lost stories. That two-word paragraph hits differently than if it were buried mid-sentence.

For Your 💌 Letter: You cannot use this technique constantly. It only works because it’s rare. But when you have a moment in your writing where something genuinely just landed…a realization, a loss, a question you can’t answer…try giving it a paragraph of its own. Even if it’s two words. Especially if it’s two words.

🗺️ Now take this map with you

The PDF for the Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 is free here.

Download it free, print it, and work through it alongside this post.

Here’s the single exercise I’d start with today:

• Find your own balcony moment. A time when your body was in one place, and your mind was twenty years away.

• Don’t write the whole memory yet. Just write the present scene. Where you were sitting. What you could see. What the light was doing. Three paragraphs maximum.

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

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🧿

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

This is my welcome gift to you. 🧿 The Story Guide Mini Workbook for Letter #1 — “The Birds Are Flying” — is yours, free. Download it, print it, and work through it alongside the letter.

[Download Free → Here.]

Inside you’ll find four craft techniques, a “Draw Your Memory First” exercise, two scene-writing prompts, a coloring page, and a foldable mini-book you can make with one sheet of paper and scissors.

Close your eyes. Draw what you see. Then write.

That is the Inward Eye Method 🧿.

🌸 May it be a blessing.

-Emily Lupita

Did you write your scene? Let me know in the comments.

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🧿

🌸 Postcard & Prompt - Mail Club

• The digital version of this month’s Postcard & Prompt is here! Feel free to save & print these JPEGS at home.

• Joining the Mail Club means you will receive one of these cool postcards printed & delivered to your home by snail mail, every month. Makes a great gift.

• Delivered to addresses in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and (most of) the EU. Anyone with an address in these countries can subscribe!

• These postcards are actually HUGE ( 6x9 in). They are easy to read and great for framing or posting to your fridge.

• SPECIAL EDITION: Women Poets Series cards will continue thanks to your positive feedback on the series. Let’s continue celebrating women poets!

• 🌸 Sign up here to receive your mailed art postcard & writing prompt.

⬆️ Feel free to save and print the digital versions above for personal use.

---

🌸 Did you try the writing prompt? How was it?

Share your thoughts in the comments. I read & reply to all comments.

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🌸

Artist Travel Memoir

Hi, I’m Emily Lupita, an American Latina poet & writer living between my hometown in rural Iowa & Ankara, the capital of Türkiye. Artist Travel Memoir is my memoir of spiritual travel (across 19 countries) that I’m writing one Letter 💌 at a time.

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Artist Travel Memoir 💌 Letters

The First Year: July 2025 - June 2026

Dear Compañeros de Camino (Traveling Companions),

11 months ago, I was flat on the floor. I had been there for a few years. Then, one morning last summer, I’d finally had enough of that (pretty terrible) view. So, I sat down at my desk in Ankara and wrote the first sentence of the first letter for Artist Travel Memoir. I didn’t know if anyone would read it. I wasn’t sure I could sustain it. I had lost my journals, my confidence, and, for a time, my voice. What I had left was a single step forward. That’s it. Only the willingness to begin again.

Today, I’m writing to you from the other side of that first year, and I want to say it out loud: we made it. Twelve letters. Twelve hand-drawn illustrations. Stories I thought were gone forever, reconstructed from memory, emotion, and the stubborn faith that the stories were still inside me…waiting to be told.

This anniversary post is my love letter to that year, and to you, my readers…who have made all the difference. Thank you.

We must look inward to see clearly.

🧿 May it be a blessing,

-Emily Lupita

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💌 The Letters

On Good Friday, from her studio balcony in Ankara, Emily Lupita watches a Turkish family picnic in the park below and reflects on how far she has traveled from a childhood playground in rural Iowa. She describes the loss of her handwritten journals, destroyed along with her online backups, and the long silence that followed. The call to prayer echoes across the city, and she finally decides to begin again without her notes: wrestling with memory, trusting the stories that lived on inside her.

As a study-abroad student in the Yucatán, Emily Lupita travels by bus to a small Mexican village to witness a passion play unlike anything she knew from her Catholic childhood in Iowa. The actor playing Jesus is tied to an actual cross in the blazing sun, and when he begins to struggle, she screams for someone to let him down (and briefly dissociates), watching the scene from a bird’s-eye view. Afterward, at the cast party, Jesus himself hands her a fish taco, and she understands for the first time that beginning again is always possible.

On a pilgrimage to the Taller Leñateros paper workshop in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Emily Lupita watches Indigenous women transform garbage into sacred paper…old receipts and molded can labels…pulped into art. A curandera burns offerings and fills the room with copal smoke, and one of Emily Lupita’s students later confesses he saw a vision: a two-headed owl carrying a woman in its belly. Emily Lupita reveals she saw the same vision. And that, years later, at the thermal pools of Pamukkale with her sons, she finally understood: she was not trapped inside the owl. She was being carried.

Sitting in a room of an Iowa nursing home, watching her mother sleep, Emily Lupita faces an impossible choice: stay in Iowa, or return to Ankara to her two young Autistic sons. She chooses to leave, a decision she has never regretted and never stopped grieving. Her father helps her up after she collapses on the cold parking-lot concrete and says what he has said so many times across years of departures. “Lupita. It’s time to go.”

Beneath her apartment building in Ankara, Emily Lupita discovers a marble octagonal hamam, and eventually finds herself welcomed into the weekly ritual of five elderly Turkish Aunties, the Teyzeler, who sing folk songs at the top of their lungs while scrubbing each other’s backs. One Teyze corrects her technique with a kese, another offers to scrub her back, and Emily Lupita pours golden argan oil into the upturned hands of each woman in turn…dissolving language, nationality, and loneliness in a cascade of steam. She still carries that fleeting feeling of sisterhood with her.

Two decades before the Turkish hamam, Emily Lupita was a young English teacher in the volcanic mountains of Miyakonojo, Japan, feeling adrift between future identities: traveler or mother, wanderer or settler. On Children’s Day, her karate Sensei and his wife whisk her and her friends up the mountainside to Sakura Sakura, a legendary mud onsen heated by the Kirishima volcano, where ancient grandmothers cover bathers in volcanic mud and invite them to whisper their greatest wish to the universe. Emily Lupita surprises herself: she whispers that she wants to have a child. Fifteen & eighteen years later, after a wave of infertility treatments, her sons Charlie and Archie were born.

Shortly after Charlie’s diagnosis of Autism (Level 3-Profound) in an Atlanta suburb, Emily Lupita meets a neighbor while pushing Charlie in his stroller, a woman who eventually invites her to a church “healing ceremony” to exorcise the “demon” she believes has taken possession of Charlie. Emily Lupita pushes the stroller directly into her house and locks the door, hiding upstairs as the woman rings the doorbell again and again over the following weeks. She addresses every person who has ever framed her children’s Autism as a curse or a punishment…and answers with absolute clarity: My sons are my biggest blessings. Full stop.

After injuring her ankle ligament while swamp-jumping in Louisiana at night looking for a blinded alligator, Emily Lupita boards a plane to Mexico anyway (on crutches) to meet dear friends in Mérida. On her friend Daniela’s advice, she visits a curandera in a small Yucatán village: a small, beautiful woman in a traditional huipil who examines the ankle, opens a jar of Vicks VapoRub, lights a candle, and prays. A wave of nausea overtakes Emily Lupita…and then something pops into place, the pain disappears entirely, and hours later, back in the city, Daniela asks, “Where are your crutches?”

At five years old, Emily Lupita fell from a two-story woodshop roof onto concrete…and was never taken to the hospital. Thirty years later, Atlanta neurosurgeons discover she survived a spinal membrane rupture that should have killed her, “without any medical intervention.” As a beginning Spanish teacher in San Miguel de Allende, she watches a man scale the famous Parroquia cathedral at night and install a string of neon lights. Emily Lupita writes a poem about his desperate act of faith, which leads her to wonder whether her childhood fall was an accident or a five-year-old’s version of plugging in a neon cross, just to see if God could still see her.

Careening solo across the top of an Ecuadorian cloud forest on a zipline, Emily Lupita tilts her head back and shouts, “Hey God! It’s Lupita! Can you still see me?” This letter weaves together three encounters with that same urgent question: a graduate philosophy seminar where her chronic back pain was used as proof that God doesn’t exist; the zipline flight; and the moment a train slammed into the front bumper of her tour bus in Puebla, Mexico, on her Golden Birthday. In a Mexican restaurant that night, her students singing “¡Feliz Cumpleaños a Lupita!” by candlelight, she recounts philosopher William James’s “Will to Believe” essay…and makes her choice.

In the grip of a quiet, corrosive despair…her marriage dissolving, her sense of self unraveling…Emily Lupita climbs the Temple of the Inscriptions in Palenque and sits on a ledge at the summit with her legs dangling over the edge, drawn toward what the French call l’appel du vide, “the call of the void.” Then a young Maya girl, no older than twelve, sits down beside Emily Lupita, takes her hands, and without a word hurls an entire bag of handmade souvenir dolls into the jungle below. “Todos somos soñadores aquí,” the girl says. We are all dreamers here. And Emily Lupita pulls her legs back from the edge.

After years in Atlanta, when Emily Lupita had given up on family travel, her sons’ severe Autism making even a trip to the grocery store feel impossible, the family moved to Türkiye, and on their first summer road trip, stopped at Pamukkale, the ancient Cotton Castle of cascading white terraced pools. Six-year-old Charlie leads them wordlessly up the hill and steps into the warm, mineral-rich water; Archie follows, giggling. The boys wear medical harnesses, which have drawn cruel comments in the U.S., but here, among ancient Roman ruins and the spirits of pilgrims who came for millennia, they feel only like wings.

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The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

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The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 3: “Blessed Be the Beast in Me” (Excerpt)

🌳 Caterpillars on a Gravel Road

There must have been hundreds of caterpillars in the grass lining the tree line, past the curved ditch and the pocket of wild roses. My brothers and I would set out early in the morning to rescue those extra adventurous caterpillars who had wandered out onto the gravel road that ran past the end of the long lane to our house. We wanted to get there before a single car came along.

We’d cradle each caterpillar as it wiggled in our palms and quickly set it back down in the grass a ways up the hill from the road. When the eventual car did approach, we’d run into the ditch and press our small bodies flat against the roadside bank so the driver couldn’t see us, just as Dad had demonstrated. Diego and I only emerged when John called the coast clear, since he was the oldest and knew best. We’d race to examine the damage from the wheels, telling each fuzzy-bodied caterpillar still alive that it was okay, that we were there to rescue it, that if it could just survive a little longer, it would do an amazing thing. It would grow wings and fly.

Then, as the months wore on, the butterflies emerged.

I did not chase them like I did the caterpillars. I sat in the tall grass at the edge of the field, and I waited. I waited the way my father had taught me to wait in the forest for the rabbits. I sat completely still and fuzzed out my eyes until the light caught my eyelids just right, and there came a moment when I was no longer looking out but looking in. Looking in toward a large black space with windows of refracted light, what Mama called meditating, and I called floating in space.

I sat cross-legged with my right hand lifted, palm facing forward near my shoulder, my left hand at the center of my chest with the wrist bent and the palm dropped open. This was when the butterflies came. They sat on my fingers and let me lift them close to my face so we could look at each other, eye to eye.

“Of course, they remember you,” Mama told me when I asked if these were the same butterflies I’d moved off the road when they were caterpillars. “You rescued them, and now they are thanking you for it.”

Dad had a different explanation. He said the butterflies were attracted to my aura. “Auras are the essence of a person expressed through energy. It creates your protective sphere.”

“What’s a protective sphere?” I asked.

“It is the field of energy that surrounds you,” he answered. “Like-minded entities are drawn to it. It is very important, Lupita, to learn to tell the difference between like-minded and opposite-minded energies. Pay attention.”

“Opposite-minded energies,” I repeated, so I’d remember.

“Yes,” he said. And then he gave the warning in a poem:

listen

our language encircles us

with prisms of knowledge that break clear light

into pyramids of color and threads of darkness.

by the hand of our faith together with truth

these words are woven into lies on the loom of desire

until we are wrapped in a silk of unbroken reflections

against which our fresh and untried wings

push!

🌳 Fresh and Untried Wings

I have thought about this poem many times over the years. What it was trying to teach me, and what it cost me to be taught it at such an early age, in that way. The teaching was real. The world does contain things that would wrap you in silken webs if you let them. The modern world, in particular, according to the poet, is very good at manufacturing the silk of unbroken reflections on a loom of desire, using language to encircle you with something that looks like knowledge but is closer to a trap. My father was not wrong about this. He was simply very early.

I was probably around five years old. I was learning to tell the difference between like-minded and opposite-minded energies, to guard my protective sphere, to trust the butterflies and distrust any stranger on the gravel road. This education had consequences I could not see yet, consequences that would take years to understand and more years to unravel. I had to learn how to replace it with a version of caution that was true for me, that left room for the embracing parts of the world rather than shutting it out almost entirely.

But on that particular summer afternoon in a field in Iowa with a yellow butterfly on my fingertip and the clover flowers sweet in my mouth, the warning felt like secret knowledge, the poem like a code only my father and I could understand. It felt like the kind of thing a father says to his daughter when he believes she is treasured, worth protecting, worth preparing carefully for a world that will not be careful with her. Not careful with her at all.

I looked at the butterfly on my finger. I looked out at the field. I looked up at the sky. I recited the section of the poem I’d memorized immediately, as soon as the poet said it, I repeated it over and over in head until it was mine. The part about how my how my fresh and untried wings push against the dark web of lies.

I said the lines from his poem aloud to the delight of the poet, and we sat out there together in the field for a while meditating and attracting like-minded energies. I decided I was the luckiest little girl in the whole world.

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🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

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🌳

The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

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🌳 The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 2: “Off the Grid” (Excerpt)

🌳 Fire in the Wood Stove

Out on the hill in winter, heat from a wood stove is irreplaceable.

There is no other warmth quite like it. Not the radiators of apartments I lived in later in the Middle East, not the gas heat of suburban houses in Atlanta, not even the fireplaces in the fine homes of people who have fireplaces for the look of them. A wood stove you depend on for survival has a different kind of warmth. It warms the bones. It warms the specific cold that has gotten all the way inside you and settled there.

Dad called this genetic memory, knowledge we remembered from our ancestors sitting around wood fires for thousands of years before us. In this dimension and in others. I don’t know about multiple dimensions, but I do believe I was born with a primal understanding of how to receive this warmth.

The work of the stove started long before winter. The heat started with finding a dying tree, if possible. One that was close enough to the house that John, Diego, and I could all make the journey on foot. Finding the axe. Making sure there were no cracks in the handle. Flying axe heads were the greatest danger when cutting wood.

“Be careful,” Dad said whenever we cut wood. “Be careful.” He didn’t say it very often. He reserved the phrase for moments and things that could actually kill you.

Dad was the only one who handled the axe until John was old enough. Then Dad took the saw, and John took the axe, and Diego and I picked up branches and put them in the sled. Once the tree was cut up and the pieces were all loaded, we pulled the sled over the ground toward home. It didn’t matter if there wasn’t any snow. Our sled worked all year round. We pulled it over dry ground in September, full of kindling, and we pulled it through January drifts full of happy dogs.

At home, Dad stacked the big pieces of wood in carefully organized piles. I always thought these were such fancy piles, because there was a particular architecture to the way he stacked them, alternating the direction of the splits to let air circulate, the way a person who has thought deeply about a thing organizes it.

We kids stacked the branches in rather less fancy piles nearby. Each morning and each night, we brought armloads inside and stacked them behind the stoves. The smell of freshly chopped wood is one I still carry in my body, the way some people carry the smell of a particular perfume or a certain food. When I smell it now, I am immediately, involuntarily, back on the hill.

Even in the middle of the night, someone needed to get up and feed the stove. This was the most important discipline of winter: the vents had to be adjusted so the fire burned hot enough to last toward morning but not so hot that it became a danger. Fire was the greatest danger inside the house. Dad said it twice, the way he said on the very few things that were urgent enough to need repeating.

“It is much easier to make a big fire from a small fire than to start a new one from scratch,” Mama would say, asking us to remind her when the fire got low. She said this the way she said most practical things, as a statement of fact that was also a rooted philosophy that guided her daily life.

Diego and I were not supposed to touch the big stove. Ever. There were thick windows on the square door, and we stood and watched through them as the flames ate the wood. The smoke got sucked upward through the chimney and was released into the winter air. I could spend so much time watching this.

The fire was company in a way that is difficult to explain if you have not been dependent on one. It was sometimes the only light, and it was always the only heat. It had a personality, a responsiveness. The fire told you things.

Scientists have studied what happens in the brain when a person looks down at fire. It activates a part of the brain that nothing else does, connected to memory, story, and our deep ancestral past. My father has always known this. Intuitively. He has always known that fire is living.

🌳 Handmade Tortillas

When we had visitors, they gushed.

The few extended family and the few friends who did come to visit us out in the countryside (a rare thing, a special thing, a thing we prepared for days in advance) would arrive and often gush at how wonderful it was. The handmade house, the wood stove warmth, the old-fashioned tranquility of a snowy evening in the country.

They were people who lived in town with grocery stores within a few minutes’ drive. Or at least in houses with thermostats, carpet, and hot showers. Often, I felt that our life was for them a kind of theater, a performance of an older, and perhaps perceived as somehow more honest, way of living. They sat in the creaky wooden chairs in the lamplight and breathed it in.

Dad would say his poems if the mood was right. If not, he would take the opportunity to comment on the over-consumption of natural resources to heat modern homes, complete with lights in every room, that was killing the planet.

“Seven generations past are weeping for this tragedy,” he’d say. “And seven generations in the future will surely weep.”

He walked around the house shaking his head and saying, “Moneymaking extravaganza,” whenever the subject of Christmas came up. It was his characterization of what the holiday had become.

I repeated these words with as much disgust in my voice as possible. “Corporate machine!” I’d rant, pounding my feet around the living room, causing him to smile. I did not fully know what a corporate machine was, but I knew it was the opposite of us, and being the opposite of us was the worst thing possible.

While Dad talked with the visitors, we kids gathered around the cook stove to watch Mama flip handmade corn tortillas with her fingertips. She cooked them directly on the stovetop without a pan, then added a touch of butter that seeped into the masa just right, without burning. It never failed to impress. The crisp, hot corn felt like magic to them. The taste of it caused them to lean back in their creaky chairs and close their eyes for a moment of stillness and peace.

I watched this happen, this closing of eyes, this leaning back. I watched it with the particular attention of a child observing adults moved by something they don’t fully understand. They were tasting the homestead. What they couldn’t taste was what it cost my brothers and me to live there. Our life had been sweetened by my mother into something they could consume with delight and then leave. Leave us be.

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🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

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The Poet’s Daughter

I’ve been writing this book my entire adult life.

It started as poems in high school, then essays in college, then an MFA at Iowa State, and writing workshops with The Atlanta Writers Club. When my son was born with special needs, I put the manuscript in a drawer for almost a decade.

Now I’m 48. My father is in his early 70s. I’m finally putting this book together, piece by piece, posting my progress with excerpts from each chapter here on my Substack.

May it be a blessing,

🧿 Emily Lupita

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The Poet’s Daughter by Emily Lupita Plum

working draft excerpt / work-in-progress

Chapter 1: “The Poems Arrive” (Excerpt)

🌳 A Childhood in Rural Iowa

The poems arrive in my father’s dreams.

He has told me this my whole life, in the same matter-of-fact tone he uses to report on the weather or the condition of a fence post. The poems arrive. He does not reach for them. He does not sit at a desk with a dictionary and a yellow legal pad, coaxing language toward meaning the way most poets do. The way I do. He goes to sleep, or he goes into the forest, or sometimes both at once. And the poems come to him in the way that weather comes, in the way that dawn comes, with no particular concern for whether he is ready.

This is what he told me. This is what I grew up believing. And for the first thirty years of my life, believing it meant simply that I lived inside it, the way you live inside a house without thinking much about the walls.

My childhood home had no running water. It had limited electricity, often cut due to nonpayment, and its use was strictly regulated by my father. It sat on a hill in rural Monroe County, Iowa, surrounded by forest and field and the particular silence of a place that has deliberately set itself outside the modern world. I did not know, growing up, that this was unusual. It was the only house I knew.

🌳 The Dream. My Father’s Version

In the dream, the poet walks out of our house on the hill. He walks in silence until he is standing in a field of tall grass down in the valley past the bass pond where the bullfrogs have gathered to sing at dusk. He remembers the lucid dream precisely: there’s a rock path leading to a far-off forest of pine trees, a stream filled with flowing water, another hill in the distance. It is springtime. Now it is night. On the distant hill, there is a fire. As the poet approaches the hill, he can see that around the fire sits an old man holding a book.

“Speak,” the old man says.

The poet opens his mouth, and bees fall out. Not metaphorically, not as a symbol he will interpret later, but bees, actual bees, tumbling from his open mouth and flying off into the darkness of the dream. He is not afraid. In the poet’s universe, bees falling from your mouth is not alarming. It is a benediction.

“Speak,” the old man says again. He holds the book out toward the poet, who takes it, opens it, and begins to read the words aloud:

I believe in seeds

I believe

in seeds planted in wild places

in the taste of river mist

in the smell of sages

I believe

in mountains while crossing the borderline and

bridges in the desert spanning the depths of time

In the dream, the poet reads on. The old man listens. The bees are somewhere in the darkness now, flying out, out beyond his vision.

When my father wakes, he is not in his bed.

He is deep inside the forest behind our house on a small hill in rural Iowa. It is winter. Just before dawn. His beard is frozen to his face. He cannot feel his hands or his feet. He does not know how long he has been out here. Hours, certainly, and probably most of the night. The forest in Iowa in January is not a forgiving place. The temperature has been dropping since sunset. The kind of cold that sits inside you and makes you question, in a slow and clinical way, whether you will make it back to the house.

A deer walks past him.

My father is so close to it that he can feel the deer’s breath on his face, a small warmth, the only warmth in the dark world around him. The deer stops. It looks directly at him. In his eyes, in this moment, the deer and the old man from the dream are the same. He has said this to me many times over the years, and I have never known quite what to do with it. He is not a mystical man in the way people imagine mystics. There is nothing ethereal or vague about him. He is precise, physical, alert. When he says he recognized the old man from his dream in the face of a deer in an Iowa forest in January, he means it as a statement of fact.

My father lifts the bow to his shoulder and releases an arrow into the deer’s heart.

The deer runs down the hillside. My father follows. He jumps on the deer, wrestles it to the ground, and slits its throat. He wraps its hind legs with a rope and begins the long pull across the frozen ground toward home. The distance is considerable. His hands are still partially numb. As he walks, the poem continues to come, words arriving in the cold air with the same authority the old man’s voice had in the dream. The poet recites it aloud into the dark:

I believe

in the journey of a soul

in destinations made manifest

by the dreams and visions we hold

I believe

in a spirit life fashioned by design

stretching across a threshold

created by leaving autonomy behind

I believe

in sunlight filtering through green leaves

in the shadows of untold winters

hugging branches of trees

I believe in an open gate and radiant splendor

in engagements ongoing which struggle to surrender

meaning to solitude and the ability to engender

space without time empowered with the impulse to remember

human beings as children and pure light as the great defender

of a faith that is defined until finally freed

by a mind which accepts then releases

this paradigm creed.

From this moment on, the poet will never forget these words.

I don’t know what it is like to carry a poem that way, to wake with one fully formed, stitched into memory before you have lit the stove or found the feeling back in your hands to hold your coffee.

I have tried to understand it. I have read. I have taken courses in literature. I studied literary theory. I went to graduate school for poetry. I have notebooks full of drafts and second drafts and third drafts of my own poems, filled with the accumulated wreckage of revision.

That is not how the poet writes poems. He does not write poems at all, actually. The poet wakes in forests with poems cascading from his mouth and pulls a deer through the snow to bring his family their winter food. He does both of these things simultaneously without finding it strange.

Yes. It is strange to many, perhaps to most. I have spent a lifetime finding it quite extraordinary. And lined with sorrow. And beautiful.

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🌳 American Bardic Poet Newsletter

American Bardic Poet

Joseph S. Plum is a poet in the bardic tradition. He lives off-grid in rural Iowa and composes his unique chant-like oral poetry for fascinated audiences around the world. Spiritual / Mystic / Star Knowledge / New Age

By Emily Lupita, MFA

Share Emily Lupita, Writer

Subscribe now

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