Pinal County AZ, December 2024

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Anti-palinode

St. Clotilde, patron saint 
of disappointing children—

disappointing the adjective, 
or verb? Yes, either way. 

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Lake Tahoe, June 2026

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I got back from Community of Writers’ week-long poetry workshop in Olympic Valley, California (a 20ish minute drive from Lake Tahoe) about three and a half weeks ago. Getting there was absolutely brutal—one flight was cancelled after hours of delays due to storms and forced me to spend the night in Charlotte, the one I was rebooked on the next afternoon was diverted to an airport in an entirely different state due to a different storm, then finally made it to the Bay Area about 27 hours after I was originally supposed to.

But friends, of course it was all worth it. I am incredibly grateful to have been able to attend Community of Writers with funding from the Hillary Gravendyk Memorial scholarship and the UVA English department. Like I said in my last newsletter, any generative environment can only help my thesis/manuscript. This was a space where I had to write every single day in anticipation of a “morning session” with a different staff poet and group of fellow writers. Every single night I wondered, How the hell am I going to finish something before tomorrow morning? And every single night I managed to pull it off! I wrote 6 poems in 6 days and already like most of them! I have fallen into a comfortable habit of being a “slow writer,” and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. My process is far more intentional and patient these days. But CoW proved to me that I can still write a whole poem in a few hours, and though it won’t be perfect it will still be something, and chances are I’ll still be proud of it.

Other highlights: visiting Donner Memorial State Park before the workshops began (if you know me you might know I was obsessed with the Oregon Trail and Donner Party as a child; the park is genuinely moving in its retelling of what they had to endure and has a beautiful monument—I did hope to write a “Donner party poem” while there, but alas, but maybe it’ll still happen?), bonding with my five housemates far more than I ever anticipated and reading our poems to each other every day after our sessions, swimming in (frigid!) Lake Tahoe with dozens of poets and having a small picnic on the beach there, telling Kazim Ali my birth chart’s Big Three and him replying Oh, nobody must fuck with you twice (I’m really trying to live up to that now), getting to hear Ama Codjoe read “On Seeing and Being Seen” from her collection Bluest Nude (my favorite collection of the 2020s so far), showing my housemate Roberto “More Than This” by Roxy Music for the first time in their life and watching them twirl around the living room that kind of belonged to us for 6 days, and the recitation event on the last day where multiple poets recited poems by Lucille Clifton—a poet key to the founding of CoW—on what would have been her 90th birthday.

It did take me a while to feel physically and mentally recovered from the long journey, hence why this is going out so much later than I might have hoped. (It’s taken me about two and a half weeks to write this, including the day I’m sending it out.) It is a taxing time overall, which I know is true for most of us these days. I have started calling this the most beautiful and difficult season of my life (thus far), with major changes on the horizon and high highs and low lows. Frankly, I’ve cried every day this month, happy and melancholy and angry tears. Most nights I haven’t slept particularly well. I want nothing more than to stop thinking about money, and jobs, and what a bleak question mark the future is on so many levels.

The difficulty of this "season” has only heightened the anniversaries of losing my grandparents, which occur in July about two weeks apart. Yesterday was the sixth anniversary of my grandmother’s passing, and it was about as emotionally wrecking as the first anniversary. It might have been this intense because I’ve been under so much stress all month—but the truth of it is, I still really miss my grandparents every single day. They lived just up the street from me when I was a teenager, and even after I left Arizona we talked every single week and I spent most of my visits with them. Several years later, there are still days when I want to call them to ask what they’re up to and tell them about my teaching, or the magnolias in Virginia, or a movie Isaac showed me.

Sometimes I still fall into the mindset that at a certain point in grief it’s time to “move on,” and it’s just not true at all. You can move forward, but not “on.” The absences stay palpable, and nothing can truly fill each one again. Even with all the poems and essays I’ve written about grief and the life-force itself it takes on, I still have to relearn this basically every year.

The view behind the space where Community of Writers happens, Olympic Valley, June 2026

As much as I don’t want to think about money, I’m scrambling to find some short term work to get me through not seeing another pay check until over a month. I applied for part time work all summer and only secured one interview, which ended in a rejection. It’s brutal out here. If you’ve gotten this far and need an editor for anything—poetry manuscripts, packets of poems for litmag submissions, short stories, memoir, transcripts, wedding vows…—email me, lydhavens@gmail! I also take poem commissions! My rates are always sliding scale! This has, unfortunately, been one of the biggest stressors in my life as of late, and I’m so grateful it’s temporary, but I’m also getting desperate. I know a lot of us are getting desperate, and/or don’t even make a living wage to begin with. It’s terrifying, and shame-inducing (even though it shouldn’t be).

I’m rambling, but do let me know if I can offer any of my services to you. It’s been a grueling Mercury retrograde on top of everything, but it will be over later this afternoon! I want to leave you with the poem I love so much and was so euphoric to hear read aloud. Take care of yourself out there.

On Seeing and Being Seen

Ama Codjoe (from Bluest Nude)

I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed
at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.
You unhooked my bra. A photograph
passes for proof, Sontag says, that a given thing
has happened. Or you leaned back to watch
as I eased the straps from my shoulders.
Hooks and eyes. Right now, my breasts
are too tender to be touched. Their breasts
were horrifying, Elizabeth Bishop writes. Tell her
someone wanted to touch them. I am touching
the photograph of my last seduction. It is as slick
as a magazine page, as dark as a street
darkened by rain. When I want to remember
something beautiful, instead of taking
a photograph, I close my eyes.
I watched as you covered my nipple
with your mouth. Desire made you
beautiful. I closed my eyes.
Tonight, I am alone in my tenderness.
There is nothing in my hand except a certain
grasping. In my mind’s eye, I am
stroking your hair with damp fingertips. This is exactly
how it happened. On the lit-up hotel bed,
I remember thinking, My body is a lens
I can look through with my mind.

Lower Crabtree Falls, Tyro VA

I’m writing this from the other side of my second year of grad school, and of the most stressful semester I think I’ve ever had. I’ve spent the last four weeks or so trying to fully decompress, a desire my nervous system has been slow to catch up on. I’m beyond grateful for the extended break, especially before I dive into my final year, my THESIS year. Since I turned in my students’ grades and officially finished everything for the semester, I’ve mostly been “hibernating” at home. I reread Sharp Objects after showing Isaac the HBO miniseries adaptation (which we’re now both obsessed with) and tore through Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke in about two days. I watched the first two Godfather movies for the first time (10/10 and 11/10 respectively). Mostly, I’ve been playing Oblivion for the first time, sleeping, and being the cat equivalent of a stay-at-home parent to Butters. (He’s thrilled but might also be a little clingy now…)

I’m also actively planning a wedding this summer. Exactly one year from now, I’ll be actively getting married and dancing my ass off with my loved ones, and it’s absolutely wild, knowing that this time next year my life will have changed and be changing significantly. (In case you didn’t know, I’m also graduating with my MFA about five weeks before my wedding… the next year will be nothing if not memorable!) Right now, it’s a lot of nitty gritty tasks that seemed so distant when we first got engaged a year ago. I’m designing our wedding website and “save the date”’s to mail out (hopefully by the beginning of July). I’m importing people’s addresses to print on envelopes. I’m learning just how many tough calls one makes guest-wise, especially when the bride and groom both know a lot of people.

I’ll admit, I have been a little salty when I haven’t been invited to certain weddings in the past. I take back all my salt, friends. I get it now. As a “recovering people-pleaser,” this process has been even more brutal than I thought.

I’m getting as much wedding stuff done as I can before next week, when I leave for the Community of Writers summer poetry workshop in Olympic Valley, California. On the cusp of my thesis year, the opportunity to write a poem every day for a week under the mentorship of poets such as Brenda Hillman, Ama Codjoe, and Kazim Ali is hopefully just what I need to continue figuring out the bones of it all. Maybe some of the flesh, too.

Some of our engagement photos, taken by Abigail Dakota

I started this “summer diaries” series last summer as I figured out where to channel my creative energy in my first summer after starting grad school. My impending thesis changes a lot this time around, but I still hope to come here to share bits and pieces of what I’m writing and the process behind it, as well as my other projects (will I finally get to dye that white skirt I bought last year?) and whatever else is on my mind. On the paywall side of things, there will also still be at least one post a month (apologies to current patrons for the finals-induced hiatus!) that’ll include a poem not found anywhere else, or an in-depth craft/process “essay,” or something just vulnerable/possibly controversial enough to only feel comfortable sharing behind a paywall. Or maybe some fun combination of all three. You’ll never know unless you subscribe for the price of what is now often less than a latte!

Looking to July and August, I’m hoping to facilitate at least a couple poetry workshops over Zoom before the semester starts again. I’ve had an idea for a multi-week workshop to read, discuss, and then write long sequence poems banging around in my head for the last few weeks. That is, poems of at least 5 pages in length written in some type of fragment of vignette that are all written and arranged toward a cohesive thematic and/or emotional resonance. “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson and “The Palace” by Kaveh Akbar are two of my personal favorites. I have two long sequence poems in my chapbook Chokecherry, and have written approximately four in my time at UVA. I can’t get enough of ‘em, and want to talk about them with other people, and I want to write them with other people.

I imagine this being at least three sessions (every other week?), with participants registering in advance. Sliding scale pricing, with no one turned away due to lack of funds. If you have read this far, please tell me if this interests you at all, either in the comments or via email (lydhavens at gmail)! And/or, if one-time workshops on something such as prose poetry or poems about intimacy/sensuality interest you? I want to do any and all of this, but have to start planning it soon if there is genuine interest. :)

Before I start to wrap this up, I’ll also plug that I started a Poshmark sell my clothes. I’m biased, but I think they’re cute. I will absolutely send you a price drop if you “heart” anything. I do bundles. I’ll negotiate with you off the app over any garment if you really want to. And if you’re reading this after June 18th, the shop will be temporarily closed until I get back from the West Coast on the 29th!

Those are some pictures of Butters being cute as thanks for reading all that. I’ll close out with this recipe for roasted potato salad from Stanley Tucci’s cookbook, The Tucci Table, that I hadn’t revisited in about five years. I made these to go with grilled chicken in a jerk marinade, and Isaac said they’re the best potatoes I’ve ever made. We’ve had them three times since then. I don’t have pictures because I never think to take one before we inhale them. Highly, highly recommend:

Roasted Potato Salad

1 whole head of garlic, top cut off to expose the cloves
2 tablespoons olive oil + a little more to drizzle
1 pound Yukon Gold or butter potatoes
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/2 table spoon lemon juice
1/2 to 1 teaspoon chopped parsley
Salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 450. Drizzle the garlic head with a little olive oil and wrap it in aluminum foil. Cut the potatoes, unpeeled, into chunks (2ish inches or so). Place them in a bowl with the olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Toss to coat, then spread the potatoes evenly on a baking sheet. Place the garlic and potatoes in the oven and roast them for 35-40 minutes, turning them about halfway through the cooking time. Remove and set aside on paper towels to cool. Remove the garlic from its foil and set aside to cool.

In a small bowl, thin the mayonnaise with the lemon juice, season with salt and pepper, and squeeze in 1 clove of the roasted garlic. In a large bowl, gently combine the mayonnaise dressing with the potatoes and add the chopped parsley. Peel the remaining roasted garlic and add it tsawqqo the potatoes. Serve right away.

Lyd’s notes: I also add a little bit of pickle juice to the dressing (let’s say half a teaspoon), and season the potatoes with Peg’s Salt which includes a spice blend.

—but of course you already knew that. What good is good 
when there are eggs to protect. Young, jogging human 
women to hiss at. Rituals to baptism, throat feathers to 
pull, aluminum picnic tables to fuck beneath,  

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My family had a friend growing up named Christos, who was incredibly charming and kind of looked like John Stamos. He was also a troubled man that I had complicated feelings about as a little girl, because his presence always underscored the fact that my biological father treated his friends better than his wife and daughters. In 2006, Christos was perpetually sleeping on our couch, and on one such night he said I should watch the new episode of Survivor with him after I finished my homework.

I had no idea what it was. I was 2 when the first season premiered and missed the show’s earliest years when castaways were household names, when the second season premiered after the Super Bowl to 43.5 million viewers, when Boston Rob was in his prime and CBS paid for his and Amber’s wedding, when the cell phone company Cingular not only still existed, but gave $1 million to the castaway with the most fan votes after the first returnee season. I had no idea about any of this, and that first episode I watched from Survivor: Panama (season 12) was almost halfway through the season’s airing.

I had no idea what was going on—but I was completely engrossed. There was an astronaut who looked completely emaciated, and whose tribemates saluted him after they voted him out. There was a man going through active nicotine withdrawal who pretended a square piece of driftwood was his Blackberry. There was an airline pilot in his 40s beefing with a 24-year-old yogi. There was Cirie fucking Fields, now one of my favorite players of all time, now one of the most iconic players of all time.

I couldn’t believe that people would agree to starve, swelter, freeze, and generally suffer for over five weeks for millions of people to see. But I couldn’t look away, and it became my favorite television show. For three and a half more seasons—Cook Islands, Fiji, China, and Micronesia—I tuned in almost every single week. I dropped an after school activity because it might have meant missing the episodes every week. I once forced my older cousins to take place in a mock tribal council, but they refused to play along and mostly voted for “Pedro.” (“Who is Pedro?” my eight-year-old self asked in a rage.) For an assignment in the fourth grade, I wrote about wanting to invite Jeff Probst to my family’s Thanksgiving dinner.

And a year and a half after showing me my first episode, Christos died suddenly. I was nine, no one in my life had ever died before, and for a while it closed a door inside me. (This was a little over a year before my uncle’s suicide, which, as I’ve documented in my poems for over a decade, closed many doors inside me.) I was too afraid to go to his funeral. I flinched every time his name was said aloud until I was about 14. I stopped watching Survivor. I stopped thinking about Survivor.

Text sent to Truj & Brian the day the cast of Survivor 50: In the Hands of the Fans was announced.

The year is 2020. We all have our details we carry from that first year of the pandemic, how our lives changed and how our perspective of the general public shifted. I won’t ask you to think about yours; I’m still unpacking mine in therapy. What does stick out: in 2020, my grandmother was rapidly deteriorating physically and mentally. My mother and I were only allowed to see her in her retirement community as her caregivers, trading off shifts with a licensed caregiver, getting our temperatures taken every time we arrived, almost never leaving the house otherwise to keep her and ourselves safe.

But my two “Things” during lockdown were weaving and Survivor. One night in May, after my grandmother had gone to bed, I decided on a whim to start a newer season of Survivor. I don’t even remember what inspired that, but I looked up the “best” season to watch as an allegedly “new” fan, and picked season 28, Cagayan, a(n at the time) newer season from 2013. Its subtitle is Brains vs. Brawn vs. Beauty, with “tribes” divided by the attribute that gets them “ahead” in life. The brains tribe had (among others) a nuclear engineer and an econ major at the University of Chicago, the brawn tribe had a cop who moonlights as an MMA fighter (😬) and a former NBA player (RIP Cliff Robinson), and the beauty tribe an NFL cheerleader and a model. You get the idea.

Reader, I watched the whole season in about 20-22 hours. And if you’re reading this and have never seen Survivor (I love you for still reading this, by the way) or want to get back into Survivor, Cagayan is one of the most thrilling seasons of the whole show. After finishing it, I watched the other 39 seasons. Yes, all of them. And at this point, I’ve seen most seasons multiple times. (I won’t say which seasons are my least favorite, but ask me if you’re curious lol.)

I’ll admit it: in the earliest months of the pandemic, there was something downright cathartic about watching countless people voluntarily suffer. But I also loved the social dynamics, the challenge beasts (especially the ones that were underestimated at first!), the emphasis on location and culture in the first 20ish seasons, the evolution from pure survival into game theory, the fact that a show can even last for now almost 26 years. There are now dozens of Survivor players who weren’t even born yet when the show first premiered. It’s pretty damn meta in the “New Era,” and sometimes frustratingly heavy on the advantages rather than simply letting the cast create their own magic, and it seems to now be run on a shoestring budget, but I’ve still tuned in to watch it live nearly every Wednesday night since the show first came back on in September 2021.

And now, nearly two decades after abandoning Survivor about a quarter of a way through the returnee season Micronesia (Fans vs. Favorites) when I was ten, I get to watch a returnee season—the fiftieth season(!!)—live again. And this time, with my fiancé.

Since moving in together, Isaac had occasionally watched new episodes with me, especially finales. After watching the last third of 49 with me, he told me he wanted to watch 50 with me and watch as many of the returnees’ original seasons as we could in ~8 weeks. These are the seasons I chose:

• Palau (season 10)

• Panama/Exile Island (season 12, the first season I ever watched)

• Tocantins (season 18)

• David vs. Goliath (season 37, featuring Mike White & many future White Lotus cameos)

• 46

Watching Survivor felt oddly personal for me before this, but there’s really nothing like watching it with someone else. I’ve re(watched) all five of these seasons about 15 times collectively, but it was downright thrilling to watch it again with Isaac’s POV in mind. He saw a tribe lose so often it was whittled down to one player. His favorite player in Panama, my most cherished season, was the guy with the driftwood Blackberry. He asked me, “When am I going to see someone actually play an idol?” about 20 minutes before watching not one, but two hidden immunity idols be played correctly in the same tribal council. He got to experience the pure chaos that is season 46, my absolute favorite season of the “New Era.” And now he’s all in with me.

Watching the premiere of season 50 last week did indeed heal something in me. I’ve rewatched the 5 minute opening montage at least three times outside of the episode itself. Coach and Ozzy are beefing again. Colby is interacting with RizGod? At some point I told Isaac, “This is one of the best nights of my life so far," and I know I meant it—after all, I’d been waiting and preparing for this for nearly six years. Now I get to share it with my favorite person… who I also think would be really good at the game.

Butters would rather get pets than a Survivor history lesson (Boston Rob proposing to Amber in the All-Stars finale, 2004)

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I’m trying to cut myself some slack: I really only have one other storm to compare this to back when I lived in Boise (which was, funny enough, almost a decade ago), but even that doesn’t seem to compare just in terms of the ice, re-freezing over and over as the temperatures dropped into single digits. This was only the second time in my life I’ve had to shovel snow.

Not to mention, I’ve come to realize Januarys have come to just be terrible months for me. I wasn’t really aware of just how much seasonal changes can affect people with bipolar until last year, and despite the steps I took to prepare for what seemed like (and turned out to be) an inevitability, it was still pretty rough. This is also my busiest semester of grad school yet. I have to take an extra pedagogy course to prepare for teaching a composition class in the fall, have my usual two classes, am still teaching my poetry writing class three times a week, and of course writing whenever I can. There are at least three other things I should probably be doing right now, but I have been writing things down all week that I wanted to put in this newsletter:

1. Most exciting of all of these updates is that Isaac & I solidified our wedding date last week! We’re getting married on June 12, 2027 in Nelson County, VA.

2. I’ve had Harry Styles’ new song “Aperture” on repeat since it was released. I just think it’s fun! I also love to picture all my friends dancing to it at my wedding, especially my maid of honor Paige, who’s also a big Harry fan. :’)

3. After 15 years of setting reading goals for myself every year, and after a serious reading rut at the end of the semester/during winter break, I decided this would be the year not to set one. It’s been oddly freeing, and I’m still reading a book a week right now for my form & theory class.

4. But, there are still many books I hope to read this year: Tantrums in Air by Emily Skillings, The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes, Deepstep Come Shining by C.D. Wright, Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks, Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi, Escape! by Stephen Fishbach, The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, and Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters, just to name more than a few.

5. One of my resolutions this year was to figure out how to make iced coffee at home that I actually genuinely like. Turns out all it took was a decent coffee maker that will in fact make iced coffee, a nice medium roast from Wegmans, and homemade brown sugar simple syrup. (Thanks for the pro-tip in a newsletter a couple months ago, !)

6. As a once-fervent Game of Thrones fan who just can’t stop crawling back to Westeros despite everything, I am really enjoying A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. The child actor playing Egg is an absolute marvel. I also had no idea the second episode was co-written by the late Aziza Barnes, who was one of my earliest influences as a poet, and wept for about 15 minutes after seeing the episode (which heavily focused on loss and grief) dedicated to their memory.

7. Isaac has been watching older seasons of Survivor with me in preparation for the 50th season later this month. We’re on our fourth season about a month, and I have to say, there was nothing more joyous for me than showing him Panama/Exile Island, the first season I ever watched live (which was 20 years ago… dear god.) And to watch him witness the genius of Cirie Fields, the poetic unhinged-ness of Coach for the first time… It has been such a bright spot among the winter depression and grad school stress.

8. God, I am just so fucking pumped for season 50. I had about a 14 year gap where I didn’t watch Survivor, but I got completely hooked again in 2020. I haven’t gotten to watch a returnee season live since Micronesia in 2008. That was also the last time I saw Cirie play Survivor live. (I did love watching her crush it on The Traitors and Snake in the Grass, though.) I’m planning on writing a longer newsletter on my relationship to this show that has its own bedroom in my brain the week of the premiere.

One more thing: I’ve been thinking about posting poem drafts behind a paywall every month as my thesis slowly but surely comes together over the next year. I’ve finally been writing more “Feast Day” poems, and have one in particular I’m eager to share. I have always hesitated to ask you all to subscribe, and even now I worry about asking people to pay monthly, especially when so many of us are struggling financially. But after a couple years of lower self-confidence, I’m really trying to believe in myself. I also, frankly, am trying to plan ahead of not getting paid for the entire month of August due to what sounds like a payment scheduling issue UVA could solve if they like, really wanted to. I’m grateful to be in an MFA program that pays me a decent stipend, but it’s still not a living wage. Subscribing for what is now often less than the price of a latte once a month for at least one poem every month could have a major impact on my ability to save money, not just for that pay-less month but potentially for after I graduate. (I shudder to think about what the job market might look like by then…)

Okay, spiel over. Thank you for reading, and please only consider it if it’s feasible for you! I’ll leave you with a picture of Butters that I took at .5 on my phone camera lens that I showed to every classmate I could today:

xoxo

Lyd

Conked out after a long day of chasing the ball up and down the hallway (taken yesterday)

If you don’t follow me on Instagram/haven’t already seen the dozens of photos I’ve posted to my story: Butters (shortened from his shelter name Butterscotch) is the orange boy Isaac and I adopted just before Thanksgiving. He was born almost exactly a month before Isaac and I spoke for the first time nearly three years ago (he’s a Pisces!), defies all “shared single brain cell” stereotypes, and is perhaps the sweetest, chillest, cuddliest little guy I’ve ever met. Genuinely, we’ve remarked on how lucky we are to have him almost every day.

For the record, I just took a second break to throw the ball around for him even more. But I’m on winter break after an especially stressful semester of grad school (mostly toward the end), and it’s that liminal stretch of days between Christmas and New Year’s when basically anything goes—right now, I’ve got all the time in the world.

I’m giving myself the rest of this week to, essentially, chill the fuck out before beginning to prep for the spring semester next Monday. I’m halfway through my MFA, which nauseates me every time I think about it. (Please do not ask me what I’m doing after this until July 2027 lol.) My thesis, a poetry manuscript of at least ~60 pages, is taking shape. (See below for a few of my favorite lines from my year’s work.) It’s structurally different from anything I’ve ever written—lots of white space/caesura and poetic forms, I’ve got a sestina and a pantoum and multiple sonnets. I’m leaning hard into my gravitation toward the lyric. I have a few different series/sequences. I’m excited to keep working on it, and to share more from it in the new year with you all.

But in this current, soon-to-be old year, I’m reflecting on how much it’s altered my life. I am engaged, somebody’s fiancée, for crying out loud! Isaac and I spent 2025 falling more and more in love with each other, feeling more and more at home in Virginia, making our little house our own, and now falling into our new roles as cat parents. We camped in the Blue Ridge Mountains this summer, and just returned from a holiday road trip to Florida. And yes, we’re planning a wedding, which is both thrilling and sickening. (When I said don’t ask me about my career plans until July 2027, that’s because I’m graduating in May and getting married in June. Am I insane? No doubt. But as my professor Sumita told me: there is no bad time to celebrate love!)

Other happenings this year: I began teaching an introductory poetry writing class at UVA, and had two of the most attentive, passionate groups of students I may ever have. I published three poems in two lit. journals. I served as a reader for Meridian, UVA’s MFA’s lit. journal. I became more involved with our chapter of the United Campus Workers union, and maintained a role on our Living Wage Campaign. I went on my longest and most strenuous hike to date.

I read 32 books. I got really into video games for the first time in my life, especially Skyrim. (I started 4 new plays this year: twice as a Nord, once as a Wood Elf, once as an Argonian. Currently I’m trying to get better at archery and destruction magic.) I watched a lot of TV. I might officially be a TV person, especially as Isaac and I build up our physical media collection more and more. This might be the spot to segue into my end-of-year lists, my favorite type of lists:

Favorite albums of 2025:

• Bloodless - Samia

• 2 - Foxwarren

• Sinister Grift - Panda Bear

• Tears of Injustice - Mdou Moctar

• Bleeds - Wednesday

• Getting Killed - Geese

• Equus Asinus - Men I Trust

• For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) - Japanese Breakfast

Favorite songs of 2025:

• “It’s a Mirror” - Perfume Genius

• “Fair Game” - Samia

• “Infinity Leaf Clover” - Saintseneca

• “I Come With Mud” - Men I Trust

• “Chintamani” - Céline Dessberg

• “Bus Back to Richmond” - Lucy Dacus

• “Phish Pepsi” - Wednesday

• “Virginia Tech” - Panda Bear

• “mangetout” - Wet Leg

• “Honey Water” - Japanese Breakfast

Favorite songs I listened to obsessively after hearing them on a TV show (doubling as a list of favorite shows I watched in 2025)**:

• “Welcome (Back)” by Land of the Loops (heard on The Sopranos 1x1 and 1x8)

• “Living on a Thin Line” by The Kinks (heard on The Sopranos 3x6)

• “Piece of My Heart” by Big Brother & The Holding Company (heard on Mad Men 6x10)

• “You Keep Me Hangin On” by Vanilla Fudge (cover) (heard on Mad Men 7x1 and The Sopranos 6x21)

• “Maria También” by Khruangbin (heard on The White Lotus 3x1 and 3x2)

• “Kuen Kuen Lueng Lueng” (cover of “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath) by Soreng Santi (heard on The White Lotus 3x1)

• “Junior’s Farm” by Wings (heard on Poker Face 1x1)

• “Barracuda” by John Cale (heard on Poker Face 2x3)

• “Going Down” by Freddie King (heard on East Bound & Down)

• “Everything Means Nothing to Me” by Elliot Smith (heard on Mr. Robot 3x4) (I’m finishing the last season right now—no spoilers please!)

**I knew a lot of these songs before hearing them on TV, but listened to them in excess after hearing them on their respective shows.

Favorite books read in 2025 (not exclusive to 2025 releases):

• Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali

• Biography of X by Catherine Lacey

• We the Animals by Justin Torres

• The World Doesn’t End by Charles Simic

• We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik

• Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

• Arrow by Sumita Chakraborty

• Bunny by Mona Awad

Favorite movies watched in 2025 (not exclusive to 2025 releases, just seen for the first time):

• The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-2003)

• Sinners (2025)

• The Dark Knight (2008)

• Game Night (2018)

• Come See Me in the Good Light (2025)

• Can’t Hardly Wait (1998)

• Heat (1995)

• Charade (1963)

• Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

• Caught Stealing (2025)

Excerpts from my favorite poems I wrote in 2025:

• “Dripping onto Revolutionary War floorboards, / calling my lover & surrendering my silence / in front of his voicemail box. My lover, / in his Bysshe Shelley year, considering which of the three / cursive whirlpools to drown himself in.”

• “To have been known like a hand / in another, a bathroom sink to cut / your hair in. Now I am a mosquito // bite between your shoulder blades. / You are a jar of garlic floating / in itself.”

• “I’m a month away from moving across the country. I’m a beheaded faucet, sobbing in syllables. It doesn’t stop // —the woman at the deli whose only job is to peel & slice onions for the perpetual vat of French Onion soup tells me to get it together, and this only makes me worse. It’s not that I don’t stop but can’t, already embarrassing enough to get choked up every time I hear “Dream On” by Aerosmith. I don’t even like that song.”

• “there are invisible apologies everywhere // bizarre martyrdoms in voluntary shrinking // rememberings with teeth // I once tried to cover the bite marks // I thought I was protecting someone // there are invisible apologies everywhere”

This was a beautiful year, a horrifying year, a life-altering year, a devastating year. These are the highlights of mine, but it feels wrong not to recognize that I have spent a lot of this year terrified. For my community, especially those who are trans and/or immigrants; for my students; for those beyond my community; for my future children; for everyone. I have had to be incredibly vigilant about my mental health this year. Often times I did not show up for others and I hope to do better in 2026. I don’t know what’s coming, but I do know that all we have is each other.

I’ll see you in the new year. Be safe, and stay warm. <3

Thank you for reading! If you liked this, I hope you will consider becoming a subscriber. If you have the means, paid subscriptions go a long for this tired grad student. If you’d like to leave a one-time tip of any amount:

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Cyanotype I made this summer (single 35mm exposure, gingko leaf, wheatgrass, & crepe myrtle blossoms)

Hi! I’m peeking out of my Grading Cave for a second because I miss you all. I had intended for my brief “Summer Diaries” to have an actual conclusion, but just after the fall semester started/just before Labor Day I was sick for over a week. By the time I realized I hadn’t really wrapped that up, way too much time had passed. (A summer diaries finale… in October? Lmao.) But, I wanted to pop in and share a couple things:

In addition to getting sick over Labor Day weekend, I also had a poem published! The first sestina I’ve ever successfully finished, “Bildungsroman,” is in Josephine Quarterly’s most recent issue. There are six years (how apt) of attempts behind this sestina—if you’ve ever encountered them, you know how meticulous and restricted they can be. This was my formal White Whale, but I finally got it right last fall. All it took was moving thousands of miles away from my subject matter and giving myself permission to loosen those restrictions! (You’ll see what I mean in the poem, which you can read and/or listen to.)

There’s a lot I want to tell you about what I’m currently working on, but I’m going to wait until the semester is over. What I will tell you: Despite being exhausted & stuck in a cycle of stress that starts anew every week, I am so deeply invigorated by the work I both produce and am surrounded by. Also, my own students in the poetry writing class I teach are making my weeks even better.

I unfortunately really am just peeking out before I have to get back to work, but thank you for reading, and thank you for being here. I’ll check back soon with something much more in-depth—I’ll leave you with a little playlist of songs I’m currently obsessed with. xoxo

• “Infinity Leaf Clover” by Saintseneca (I’m a huge fan of 7+ minute songs that sound like at least 3 songs in 1)

• “Eyes Closed” by Melody’s Echo Chamber (literally just came out but I am entranced)

• “Welcome (Back)” by Land of the Loops (sometimes I listen to this while going about my day & pretend I’m Tony Soprano)

• “Magic Arrow” by Timber Timbre (similarly, sometimes I listen to this while going about my day & pretend I’m Mike Ehrmantraut)

• “Kogarashi” by Kikagaku Moyo (I’m forever dismayed I didn’t know about this band until after the year after they’d broken up)

• “Valle Local” by José González (this song makes me wish my feet moved ~20 times faster)

• “Living Room” by Andy Shauf (the storytelling in these lyrics never fails to blow my mind)

• “Dolphin” by Linda Perhacs (Isaac showed me her whole album a couple weeks ago—cannot recommend enough if you’re into psychedelic folk)

I had just returned from Looking Glass Falls in North Carolina when I found out Andrea Gibson passed away. Sometimes I feel like waterfalls are humbling the same way grief is, that I am at the mercy of their volume. Maybe not “humbling.” “Overwhelming”? That’s all to say that I sat in the parking lot after I opened Instagram & wept, then found myself doing the exact thing I hate doing while on vacation, especially camping: I kept checking the app, even though my service was spotty at best. I wanted to keep reading others’ tributes to them & their invaluable work, & DM-ing friends I used to only see at out-of-state poetry slams who also discovered that small, strange world after hearing Andrea’s poetry for the first time & thinking, I want to do that too.

I see now that there is a whole parade of writers who were inspired by Andrea Gibson to write, or to keep writing. I was one of the latter—I began writing poetry when I was in middle school, but their spoken word album Flower Boy had a significant hand in pushing me to not only continue to write poetry, but to start sharing it when I was in high school. I want to do that, too. By that, I mean be brave. I mean be honest.

Over a decade later, I’ve been struggling to accept just how honest I was in my poems when I was younger. Returning to Andrea’s work this past week has helped me get closer to a sort of peace about it. I can at least accept that what I need as a poet & a person now is different from what I needed then. If I didn’t actually get what I needed then, I at least made do. But back then what I needed was to hear someone like Andrea speak. “The day I opened my veins the doctor who stitched me up asked me if I did it for attention,” they wrote. “For the record, if you’ve ever done anything for attention—this poem is for attention—title it with your name.” I played that poem for an adolescent psychologist once just to show her what I’d found, & how it was affecting me. They helped me not only be honest, but be honest with myself.

I can’t say I knew them personally, but again, slam is a small world. Our paths connected multiple times, both inevitably & organically. When I competed at the National Poetry Slam in 2017, they co-hosted a queer open mic that had such a massive turnout the sign-up sheet had to become a lottery, with names pulled out of a hat to determine who’d read. (Mine wasn’t pulled.) After, the line to meet them looped around the auditorium & into the lobby.

They were the closest a poet’s ever gotten to being a rockstar without picking up a guitar themselves. I saw them perform at a small gallery in Phoenix in 2013, & they signed books & talked to people afterwards. I realized I had nothing for them to sign, because I was fifteen & my mom drove me there. I ended up asking if they’d sign my admission ticket. They did so gladly, & when I thanked them for their work, rambled about how much it meant to me as a young, queer, mentally ill poet, they took my hand & said, “Thank YOU. Keep being here.”

That ticket is still somewhere in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I couldn’t find the deep fried photo I know I took of it & shared on my Facebook.

What I did find: the post where it was announced Andrea Gibson would be performing at Treefort Music Festival in Boise, & that I would open for them. This was going to happen in March 2020. Enough said. It devastated me, but everything else was far more devastating at the time. The next year, they announced their cancer diagnosis, & I was—am—just grateful to have had such an opportunity enter my life in the first place, even if it never happened. They told me to keep being here, & there I was. All I wanted was for them to keep being here, too. I’ve lost count this week of how many others clearly wanted that, too.

There is now a whole generation of poets who became with at least some influence from Andrea Gibson. Not just in their work, but in their spirit, generous & gracious in the way you wish everyone’s spirit was.

Isaac & I went to a second waterfall that day, much smaller than Looking Glass, & barely gentle enough to stand under. It was a mile uphill to get there, so we were both ready to by the time we made it. As I stood underneath, I couldn’t hear a thing. I thought of Andrea, & how nearly every time I was in the same room as them the space was filled with applause for them. I thought of the way they’d inhale sharply while reciting poems. I thought about how waterfalls could be considered generous, too.

Twelve years later, I can’t say it to them directly again, so I’ll just say it here: thank you.

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Issue 17 of Grist. You can get a copy here.

Sagittarius Rising

Five days out from eclipse season,
an astrologer wishes me luck—
I wouldn’t know where to put it.
Brass nails splitting my twelfth house.
In the unvacuumed corner,
a nude Polaroid. Tiger’s
eye for my inner child,
a rotisserie chicken’s smallest bones
in the trashcan.
And in the other room
a piano lesson, metronome scratching
like another’s fingernails. It makes me
zone out,
only focused on the apart in apartment.
My lover speaks Dutch in his sleep
& I feel like I’m intruding.
Part of me always dissecting itself,
bringing me to middle school
& its owl pellet experiments. I’m getting older.
I’m losing my bite, my venom.
But I have so. many friends to visit in LA now,
more than one man who loves me
but does not see me, claustrophobia
after deciding to stay in the same city for seven years.
Back to middle school again,
a mouse’s jawbone tweezed from the pellet,
microscope in the corner, the fear of being disliked.
To think this much is to doom yourself,
said the astrologer.
My head is a hive, said my lover.
I reply,
The Dutch word for astronaut is astronaut.
I looked it up.
It’s not like I don’t want to float, too.
In lieu of bodies of water of another edible,
I’ll take a shower that makes me pink & humid
as a newborn rabbit,
believing this brightness to be the world
until my eyes, inevitably, adjust.

This is my first poetry publication in over a year, & this poem took me nearly a year to finish. To put it in some context I won’t elaborate on any further, I began writing it in one relationship & finished it in another.

Around this time it was taking me far longer than I was used to to complete pieces than I was used to, but this was a long time. I think an extended time frame like this had only happened once before. And of course in the moment I couldn’t understand why it was taking so long, why it felt like its ending was out of reach for months.

I’ve now come to the conclusion that I couldn’t finish a poem about feeling like a stagnant freak until I stopped feeling like a stagnant freak. (Mostly, at least.) When I first started it, I don’t even think I knew that was what the poem was about. And before it even felt like a poem, it felt more like a magpie-esque collection of images, some from my imagination & some from my actual day-to-day life. I knew what the poem might look like, but not what it was saying.

Speaking of visuals, the form of this poem also evolved over the course of that year. Originally it was a prose poem, imitating that stagnancy I was starting to figure out. It became lineated about four or five months in, the stanzas broken on instinct. (I cannot stress enough how much of my process can be boiled down to pure vibes.) I don’t remember when I replaced the stanza breaks with varying caesuras, but something seemed to click when I revisited the sections about apartments & astronauts. Do I want space? How much space? I pretty meditated on that for a week before I began to experiment with caesura & revisit the line breaks.

I’d seen Interstellar for the first time just as the poem was first starting. As the first line suggests, it was also an eclipse season. There were a couple years in my life where I saw astrology as a means of, frankly, figuring out how to get my shit together. I got an obscene number of tarot readings. I followed the CHANI app religiously. I was still pretty fresh out of undergrad, & I wasn’t handling how little control I had over my life & its circumstances well. To me, Interstellar was mirrored that lack of control—a heightened version of that, of course.

The details about dissecting animal pellets were the last to be added, & the details that helped me figure out when the poem was done. There was originally a line about the moon being a scorpion’s egg that I loved, but it just never quite fit. I’ll put it in another poem someday. But I unlocked this memory when I first began a job in a middle school, of dissecting owl pellets in the 8th grade the day before a mental health crisis kept me out of school for the rest of the semester. The stale, farm-y smell & my teacher’s mustache. And that feeling every middle schooler has, that they too are being dissected, both by their peers & themselves. In a time where I seemed to disect everything—the skies, my relationships, my self esteem—returning to that viscerality is what helped finish the poem.

Thanks for reading! The timing of this also means I just finished my playlist of the month of June, which you can listen to here. After losing Sly Stone & Brian Wilson in the same week, I spent a lot of time with their music. There’s also songs by Panda Bear, Brittany Howard, Black Sabbath, Foxwarren, & more.

There’s also a second poem of mine in this issue of Grist, but it’s vulnerable in a way none of my published poems have ever been vulnerable before—so you’ll have to get a copy if you want to read it. :)

Me through the sunroof, Nelson County VA, taken by Isaac.

Happy summer solstice, friends! This, the longest day, is my favorite of the whole year. I’m hoping to get married as close to this day as possible two years from now. I love every solstice tbh, the exchangings of light & temperature, but there’s just something about today that always rejuvenates me. I generally feel more in tune with myself in the summer—maybe it’s because I grew up somewhere that has, to say the least, memorable summers. Maybe I’ve just never lost that childhood association between summer & freedom, even with jobs in adulthood that gave me little to no free time.

But right now, I have the immense privilege of a year-round graduate stipend, so my first summer in the southeast has been completely my own. I’m learning a lot about how much sweat the human body can actually contain—my god, real humidity is truly something—listening to a lot of Lucinda Williams & Waxahatchee & MJ Lenderman, watching TV that’s fully engulfed in its settings. (I just started a rewatch of The Sopranos, & we just finished the first 2 seasons of Fargo in about 2 weeks.)

It’s an adjustment climate-wise, but what I love the most is how alive everything is. Being surrounded by green which only gets greener with every thunderstorm, coming to an understanding (within myself) about the many many bugs here, watching mist rise in the morning until it’s so thick it covers the (very green) mountains. I sweat through my clothes almost every day, but that’s only a reminder of life, too—that I’m both alive & surrounded by life.

In the summer I also do a lot of playlist-making. My monthly playlists, which I’ve been making for about 3 years now, extend from 20 songs to 25 May through August. When I was 20 I started naming my summers, in the spirit of that perfect Lorde lyric “every perfect summer’s eating me alive.” Looking back on all of these, I feel the heightened sense, & am surprised by how much I remember but can’t put into words. I also like seeing what songs carry over from one summer to another & are present in more than one playlist. So, I wanted to share some of these past playlists with you, along with some of their vibe.

Summers on someone else’s couch: I made this playlist this year, but it’s encapsulating the summer of 2016, when I was 18 & had just moved to Boise. I did indeed sleep on someone else’s couch, in a North End apartment that had once been a darkroom & was almost certainly haunted. I spent pretty much that entire year manic & imploding, feeling like a complete failure. Which is to say, I was 18. And it was my first summer experiencing those long Boise nights, where the sun doesn’t go down until past 9PM. Featuring Sky Ferreira, Slaughter Beach Dog, Steve Lacy, & Alvvays.

peony summer: The first of those named summer playlists I was talking about, & by far the least organized. You know that screencap of Marge Simpson saying “seems I’m full of rage” while squinting? That’s how I imagine myself at 20, especially after looking at this playlist 7 years later. But the summer of 2018 is one of the funnest I’ve had, touring around both the West & East Coasts & reading my poems in slam feature spots. I spent an evening in Manhattan walking pier to pier until my feet started to bleed, listening to the then-new Hop Along album. I blasted “Night Shift” by Lucy Dacus while riding around Manchester with Red. I wept on the bus from Northampton to Boston to “Linger” by The Cranberries, because I loved someone so deeply it terrified me to tell the truth.

carnation summer: From the summer when I first started this newsletter in 2019, & kind of named after it. Naming the prior summer “peony” had been more of a vibe thing: despite everything, my heart felt wide open. But the carnation comes from something I read about it being a symbol for gratitude, which led me to get my giant carnations tattooed on my right arm that May. After having spent the previous summer racing from place to place, I wanted this one to be quiet, more meditative. It ended up being the summer my grandfather died. Yet the first image in my mind’s eye when I think of that summer is the sunset over the Boise River on one of my nightly walks from my dorm to Julia Davis Park. Featuring Jamila Woods, Jeff Rosenstock, Angel Olsen, & Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac.

the loneliest summer: Well, this was the summer of 2020. Enough said.

prickly pear summer: Made while I was ending my 14-month stint in Arizona brought on by lockdown, & preparing to come back to Boise to finish my last semester of undergrad. I’d just learned how to weave, so my hands were always busy. Overwhelmed yet stagnant. & very aware that I will never spend another summer in Arizona if I can help it. Featuring Alanis Morissette, Simon & Garfunkel, Arlo Parks, & Slow Club.

grenadine summer: After I graduated, I was fixated on writing poetry that was the complete opposite of what I’d been writing for nearly a decade at that point. They were erotic & excessive, fully rooted in pleasure & detail. Inevitably, I gravitated to songs that I felt did the same. Featuring Maggie Rogers, Frank Ocean, The Stone Roses, & Edith Piaf.

hedonism in the summer: Pretty much in the same vein as grenadine, except more escapist. This is from last summer, when we were executing a cross-country move & needed to stay upbeat by any means necessary. I was exhausted, but knew I’d be exactly where I wanted to be soon. Featuring Remi Wolf, The Modern Lovers, Khruangbin, & Chappell Roan.

Garden of the Gods, Colorado Springs, July 2024

I’m two weeks into the practice of writing or collaging (almost) a page every day. (It was originally meant to be a Morning Pages practice, but I’ve discovered that Afternoon Pages are definitely more my speed.) I have an ongoing list of poems I want to write. I’m going to try my hand at a latch hook yarn project, and at dyeing some garments I’ve been holding onto for at least one or two moves. My commonplace book, which mostly collected dust while school was in session, is back in my daily routine: I’m currently recording my highlighted passages from Ada Limón’s You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World anthology in it.

And this newsletter, which began the summer before my junior year of college—which ended up becoming the summer my grandfather died, and the last summer before COVID—will hopefully flourish again, with shorter but more frequent letters about whatever I’m working on, can’t stop thinking about, find exciting, etc etc.

Right now I am thinking a lot about creating, and planning. I’m not as heavily fixated on astrology as I once was, but my Saturn return began at the end of May, and I discovered it’s in my fifth house of creativity/creation and pleasure/sex. Inevitably, it feels apt, maybe even fated? I’m chewing on what my thesis might focus on, gravitating toward visual poetry, form, work with a sense of place and a sense of sensation. Something that is still open but not entirely autobiographical. Is it still about feast days, and nourishment, and worship, and yes, pleasure and sex? This summer, maybe I’ll figure it out.

Oh, and I’m going to start planning a wedding this summer, for a couple summers from now. It’s wild to begin something you’ve at least kind of always wanted to have happen in your life, then realize you know nothing about how it actually occurs. Good thing I know so many married people, I guess! But I’ve been feeling an almost childlike excitement about it, at least in these early days where we don’t have a date or venue or any idea what everything will actually cost yet. I’m looking at wedding dresses online, and it’s not just a “maybe someday” thing. It’s a little girl, “First Day of My Life by Bright Eyes” sort of excitement. I wanted to name it before the real stress begins.

I’ll leave you with a few pages from my Moleskine, which gets thicker & heavier every day. Materials include old National Geographics, old papers I bought off eBay, cutouts from promotional mailers from The Met, a lipstick blot from the night of a party, & a daffodil from our front yard.

Until soon,

Lyd

In the pictures above, Isaac had the ring in his pocket and hoped to get some sneaky pictures of him holding it out while I still wasn’t looking, but I turned around too quickly. We’d just driven two & a half hours east to Norfolk, Virginia to celebrate our anniversary, checked in to a small inn painted teal, had scallops & fish & chips for dinner at the nearest pier. It was frigid, and so windy we were getting earaches, but I wanted to take some photos of the horizon from the shore on my point & shoot. I turned back around to get another shot from a different angle. When I turned around again…

(Photo from the next morning, when it wasn’t quite as stormy out)

It has been a week since this, what I know with full confidence to be the happiest moment of my life (so far), but this is really the first time I’ve sat down to actually write about it. Now that I am attempting to, I don’t know if I know how to write about this kind of joy yet. But as a writer whose work is constantly trying to name specific, complicated emotions & dynamics & experiences, what luck to have something so easy and beautiful to name now.

It doesn’t help that it’s the homestretch of spring semester so my head is generally swimming. (One might even call that kind of swimming, um, drowning.) A true meditation on this kind of joy will have to happen later. I just want to shout this good news from whatever rooftop I can.

But also, I don’t think I’ve gushed about my fiancé enough here. I don’t get to be surprised very often, but the logistics of this weekend trip were mostly a mystery to me until we pulled up to the sweet little teal inn. The proposal happened in a moment that both caught me off guard & was completely intimate—no one else was on that beach with us, so only he & the ocean got to hear my shrill, euphoric screams. It was also the first time I’ve ever set foot in the Atlantic Ocean! (For only a second though, because it was freezing & belligerent.) Isaac & I camped at the Oregon Coast only a couple weeks before we left the region last summer, & ever since he’s said it’d only feel complete when we touched an Eastern coast. I said we’d know when to go, when the time was right. Neither of us knew how correct the other was.

More soon, when I am on summer vacation!! Until then, take care. <3

—Lyd

Thank you for reading! If you liked this, I hope you will consider becoming a subscriber. If you have the means, paid subscriptions go a long for this tired grad student. If you’d like to leave a one-time tip of any amount:

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Any support and readership means the world. xoxo

January always feels stretched out, but this one went through a goddamn taffy puller. New Year’s already feels far away, but that might be because I spent the night at home watching Community with my partner. We were going to get tequila to make margaritas, only to discover that the ABC stores in Charlottesville close early on New Years Eve. In the last minute of 2024 & the first minute of 2025, we listened to “English House” by Fleet Foxes in the dark. I was asleep by 12:45.

Now it’s the month I was born in, & I feel like I’ve just aged a year within the last month. The day before I began my teaching appointment, I was watching The Hunger Games in the living room when shots began to fire somewhere, seemingly right outside my door. I hit the deck around the fourth or fifth; the neighborhood has since agreed there were twelve altogether. And then, silence. It was so quiet as I called 911 that I wondered if it had somehow been all in my head. Of course, it wasn’t—the duplex next to ours was targeted in a drive-by. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but I spent my first week as a graduate instructor more on edge than usual.

I’ve been struggling to share any of my thoughts without immediately wanting to rewrite them. I started & restarted this newsletter about 20 times. Like almost everyone I know, I’ve been reconsidering/grappling with my relationship with social media (specifically Meta) & attempting to establish stronger connections outside of those platforms. Like everyone I know, I’m trying to channel my fear into productive action that cares for & protects my communities. But also, like… what do I even say right now, as everything I worried would happen in the U.S., happens or might happen soon? I keep searching for the “right” thing to say, knowing full well there is no right thing to say. There is only what I can do, and how I can show up for my people. I’m figuring it out offline.

Aquarius Season collage in my journal, using a treasure trove of Washi stickers my friend D. gifted me :)

One glimmer in January was that I managed to read, write, & create way more than I was expecting to in the midst of adjusting to the workload of both a graduate student & instructor. I teach a class on poetry writing three times a week, with a syllabus & course packet I’ve been designing in my head for close to a decade. The conversations I have with my students about poetry, followed by my own workshop & classes, have my brain in this spot of productive bliss. Here’s hoping I can keep this momentum going throughout February & beyond!!

Currently writing: a poem I’ve referred to as a Silly Bummer, about crying & finding yourself unable to stop even though you really, really want to; the beginnings of (what I hope will be) a crown of sonnets centered around our cross-country move from Idaho to Virginia.

Currently revising: a poem about taking Isaac to Arizona for Christmas with my family; a poem about a gnarly sunburn I got from reading in the Willamette for too long; a long poem (15+ pages) about… well, a lot of things, but mostly Catholicism.

Currently reading: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali, Bunny by Mona Awad (I never knew I needed a cult-y horror novel that takes place in a fiction MFA program—if you didn’t know you needed that too, now you know), Judas Goat by Gabrielle Bates (a reread, as my poetry class is discussing it this upcoming week!).

Another Washi/sticker journal collage, inspired by “Bovine Excision” by Samia.

It’s kind of unreal how many spectacular new songs were released in January. “Bovine Excision” by Samia was my most-listened to song all month, and I have a feeling her upcoming album might be my favorite of the year. As my classmate Jack said when we were discussing her: “She is a lyric poet.” I’ve also had “It’s a Mirror” by Perfume Genius and “Orlando in Love” by Japanese Breakfast on repeat.

Other glimmers from the long, often-nightmarish but still-nourishing month:

• building a human adult-sized snowman with Isaac the morning after the massive storm

• frozen ponds

• homemade shrimp curry

• watching Eraserhead with some of my cohort the week after David Lynch died

• the Jeff Probst T-shirt Emily got me for Christmas

• the refried bean volcano with salsa/queso lava Gabriel & Heather had at their joint birthday party

• the texts my mother sent me as she & her best friend went on a self-guided Breaking Bad tour while visiting Albuquerque

• realizing that I might be finally learning my way around Charlottesville!! A miracle!

• knowing that mentally, I am still doing much, much better than I was in January 2024

• knowing that I am doing exactly what I want to be doing every single day

Like I said, there is no right thing to say right now, or maybe ever. And anything I say about staying safe or taking care of yourself still feels hollow. But do take care.

More soon. xx

—Lyd

At Yellowstone Lake, July 2024

Around this time a year ago, I was just hoping like hell I’d be somewhere else in another year’s time.

Dear self, you are so many different kinds of somewhere else right now.

This was a year, years in the making—I was accepted into the University of Virginia’s fully-funded MFA program, moved in with my partner when we moved across the country together this summer, & visited 12 states in the process. I’ve struggled to feel “at home” anywhere for most of my life, but between living with just Isaac & being in our cozy little brick duplex that’s walking distance from UVA, with our art mingling on the walls but our completely separate (matching!) bookcases & stockpile of incense, it’s happening. I feel it. I feel at home.

It’s truly a powerful thing to be seen, to be believed in, to do exactly what I’ve always dreamed of. Not a day has gone by in the last 6 months where I don’t feel like the luckiest freak on the planet.

In an earlier draft I began this newsletter by saying that as I’ve gotten older, I’ve craved more & more nuance. So, here’s some: in 2024, my mental health has been the lowest it’s been in nearly a decade. I have spent most of it feeling like my nervous system is on fire, fighting to be a somewhat functioning human being, & trying to regain any semblance of control over my emotions. I switched medications in January & had such vicious side effects that I missed a week of work, had to go to a crisis center overnight, & was scared off of trying anything new for months. I only found something that seems to work in October. I’m writing this now from mostly the other side. Frankly, it’s probably going to take me at least another year to feel recovered from everything I endured because of my brain this year.

What I’m trying to get my brain to focus on on this last day of this wild year: the fact that I’m still here, & made life-changing progress with my PTSD, & living a life I could only fantasize about until recently, & so in love I question if it’s fundamentally changed me. (Of course it did! Of course it did!)

I began this year at my lowest, & as it’s ending I feel like the luckiest freak on the planet.

More photos from Oregon/Montana/Wyoming, July 2024.

I wrote some long poems this year

& decided to share one of them as a digital “mini-chapbook,” available on a pay-what-you-can scale (suggested: $5). I wanted to share something I’m proud of creating this year—plus I’m unfortunately ending the year very broke, LMFAO.

Beginning with Eve began in my MFA workshop after studying the zuihitsu, a hybrid form dating back to tenth century Japan. It’s part personal essay, part poem, part stream-of-consciousness (one translation of “zuihitsu” is “follow the brush”). I’ve been writing a lot about violence & proximity to violence, & have also been watching a lot of TV. This poem is the end result, named after the early X-Files episode that I only just watched for the first time in the fall & completely rocked my shit. I’ve already talked about what this poem is “about” a lot on Instagram, & now I’m worried I’ve given too much away, so I won’t say anymore here.

There’s a lot of blood in this poem, though. Just so you know.

If you’d like to read Beginning With Eve, fill out the order form here.

& finally, some 2024 favorites

I read 40 books & watched 78 movies this year. I didn’t keep track of how many TV shows I started or finished, but might have to do that in 2025 after how much I ended up watching.

I finished Six Feet Under for the first time, which might be my favorite show of all time now. Isaac & I watched all of Atlanta together, & I have never been more floored by the writing on a TV show before. We also watched all of Adventure Time, which I had never seen before (& healed something in me), & finished Freaks & Geeks after we both started watching it in high school but never got through (it’s a masterpiece, the ending made me bawl, when we first started dating Isaac told me I look like Linda Cardellini & god I wish that was true).

And for the dozens of you who also care about Survivor: damn, both seasons this year were phenomenal. I loved both seasons & their winners for different reasons, & had the thrilling experience of having the person I rooted for from Day 1 win 47. I hope I never stop loving this whacky reality show that’s now been on the air for nearly 25 years (?!).

Favorite reads:

• Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar: when one of your favorite poets releases an absolutely brilliant novel, it’s difficult not to have a mostly-good year. If you haven’t read this yet, it is probably my #1 recommendation just for books released in 2024.

• The Good of the Woods by Liz Moore: I read most of this 500-page mystery in a day & have been chasing that high ever since.

• Big Swiss by Jen Beagin: a novel has never made me laugh more! If you’re someone who uses the word “delicious” to describe gossip, this book is for you.

• Find Me as the Creature I Am by Emily Jungmin Yoon: contains my favorite love poem of the decade so far. Thank you to my advisor for recommending this collection to me just as it was being released!!

• Room Swept Home by Remica Bingham-Risher: a poetry collection centered around a family tree’s archive that completely shifted how I think about my own autobiographical poetry.

• The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart by Gabrielle Calvocoressi: with the sequence of recollections the book is named for, the crown of sonnets about an adult drive-in theater, & the other visceral sequence detailing the 1944 Hartford Circus fire, this is my favorite kind of poetry collection, one that makes me curious & feeling so deeply & hoping I can find a way to honor forgotten histories, too.

• Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado & Vince Rause: I wanted to read a lot more nonfiction this year, but only read this (& a memoir that I mostly hated). But if I was only going to read one nonfiction book, I’m glad it was this one. I think it speaks for itself, too. If survival stories fascinate you & you haven’t read this yet, you must.

I tried to come up with a catchier name, but I’ve got nothing.

Here is my playlist with some of my very favorite songs released in 2024. There’s the slower, folkier streak beginning with Laura Marling, my favorite singer for nearly 15 years now; Mdou Moctar, my most-listened to artist of 2024; and MJ Lenderman, who kept my light Americana streak going & taught me there’s milkshakes AND there’s smoothies. I put Baby Rose & BADBADNOTGOOD’s Slow Burn EP above any full-length album this year—her song “Caroline” featuring Mereba is one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard & now makes me weep uncontrollably most of the time.

But this year my Spotify Wrapped was probably the least depressing it’s ever been, so the playlist does pick up, with shimmering bops like “Cherries & Cream” by Remi Wolf (the artist I’m trying the hardest to see live in 2025), “Ada Jean” by Khruangbin, & “Timelapse” by Dora Jar.

By the way, this is my last.fm & I would love to connect with more people on there!

Favorite movies I watched for the first time:

• Burn After Reading (2008)

• Brooklyn (2015)

• The Holdovers (2023)

• Poor Things (2023)

• Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)

• Casablanca (1942)

• Being John Malkovich (1999)

• Nosferatu (2024)

See you all in the New Year—be good to yourselves!

xoxo
Lyd

What I failed to account for was how my life is not usual to me yet. I’m not a fish out of water, but I am definitely a desert creature who is no longer in the desert. Last Monday, I exited the windowless classroom my workshop class gathers in to discover the most torrential downpour of my life was occurring outside. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that—I had never, in my almost 27 years on this planet, seen it rain that much at one time, but also cumulatively over the past two or three weeks. And of course, my “it’s a dry heat” ass hadn’t brought an umbrella. I walked five minutes to the spot Isaac said he’d pick me up from, waited maybe two or three minutes beyond that for him, & was completely saturated with rainwater by the time I got into our car. I had to wring out my blouse & jeans over our bathtub. My sneakers are probably a lost cause by now, because I didn’t think to wash & dry them immediately. I thought of the 1998 adaptation of Madeline, which I don’t think I had thought of since 2006: the scene where she falls into the Seine & her dog rescues her. That was my first line of comparison for how drenched I was, a movie I haven’t watched in nearly two decades.

Then again, a mountain town like Asheville, 300 miles from the coast, getting drowned out by a hurricane is also not usual. It’s completely unheard of & terrifying, actually. The deluge last Monday was the brunt of what Charlottesville endured, but parts of Southern Virginia (in addition to Asheville/Western NC, Northeastern Tennessee, & so many other areas of Appalachia who never expected to have to endure a hurricane like this) have not been so lucky. I have been trying to put my terror as a nearby bystander to the side & do whatever might actively help. If you have the means & are looking to donate from elsewhere, I donated to Beloved Asheville last week, & am hoping to donate to Holler 2 Holler, a mutual aid collective in Southwest Virginia, when I get paid later this month.

So yes: as much as I wanted this September to be easier (but not easy!), it was not, but I do take some odd comfort in the fact that it wasn’t only difficult for the usual reasons. Having lost multiple people to suicide during Suicide Prevention Week is… something to navigate, I’ll just say that. It is a week I try to spend away from my phone, or most conversations. I did tell myself I wouldn’t post on social media at all on the anniversary of my uncle’s suicide, which I have done every year since I was fourteen or so. This was the year I asked myself why I have that desire every year. Was I getting anything out of it anymore? I decided I wasn’t. But then the day itself arrived, & I just… I needed to say something. I’ll interrogate this need again next year, but I gave in.

“I have not been ok this week,” I ended up saying on my Instagram story. “I don’t know what I need except to acknowledge that.”

(I took this to send to my parents in Arizona. For some reason I thought that they’d find it amusing but it only made my mother worry!)

I’m ok now, at least for now, which is all I can ask for in any given now. I am getting into the routine of writing something every day, which was my goal coming into grad school having barely written anything for the better part of a year. I’m also figuring out how to balance reading for school with reading for pleasure—over the weekend I started rereading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, a novel I first read when I was 20 years old on a bus from Manhattan to Boston, one of my fondest reading memories. I told Isaac that I think this is the book that in some ways prepared me to both read & adore One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m a sucker for historical, multi-generational sagas, & I needed that itch scratched again. And six years feels like just long enough for a book to become new again in some capacity.

I came to my MFA program a couple months ago thinking I was going to finish the manuscript I’ve been working on since my last semester of undergrad. Now, I’m not so sure, but that doesn’t scare me as much as I assumed it would. I wanted so badly to write something about actively seeking out pleasure for what feels like the first time, but without anything dark or depressing. But I quickly realized upon coming here that to do that would be only half a book—because it doesn’t answer the question of why I felt like I was only allowed to lean into pleasure, food, sex, joy in my early/mid twenties, & the answer is trauma from violence, fear rooted in said trauma, the desire to not be perceived because being perceived only seemed to bring trouble.

I just didn’t want to write any more poems that made me relive that past, & feel stuck in it. (I already did that for years competing in slams!) So, I’m not going to. I’m figuring out how to write about violence & proximity to violence without feeling violated. In writing about the same things, I am not writing the same poems I wrote when I was eighteen. Much like rereading a novel after more than five years, I come to it now with a new perspective.

But speaking of returning & new perspectives: last weekend I used oil pastels for the first time since I was a teenager! Around 14 I desperately wanted to become a visual artist, & dabbled in both photography & oil/chalk pastels. Of course, I never really stopped taking pictures, but forgot about the pastels after I began competing in slams at 15. I mostly enjoyed drawing breasts of various sizes & shapes with pastels as I came to understand being bisexual/queer, & joked about doing it again with the set I bought at Michael’s. Instead I drew a saguaro, like the ones I grew up around. I turned in a poem formatted to look like two toppled saguaros to my Form & Theory class a couple weeks ago, & have been describing them to Isaac & my classmates with a reverence & admiration that started to sound more & more like idolatry. I think they are the only thing besides my family that makes me homesick for Arizona. I drew one, smashed together a light green pastel with a warmer gray, & began drawing. I don’t have the words for it yet, but I remember how it felt to use pastels at 14—and I felt it again at 26.

(Compared to a print of a saguaro near my parents’ house I took in late 2021)

Hey, thank you so much for reading! If any of this resonated or you’re compelled to read further, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. And if you liked this enough that you want to throw a few bucks my way, you can do so at:

Venmo: Lyd-Havens
CashApp/PayPal: LydHavens

More soon. It’s also been almost 6 months since I shared a poem here—should that be my next newsletter? Let me know, if you feel so inclined. xoxo

I hope you all had a restful Full Moon/Lunar Eclipse last night. It poured rain in Charlottesville all day, so nothing was visible, but I had a wildly fruitful writing session upon finishing the early X-Files episode “Eve.” If you’ve seen it, you know it’s an especially bonkers “monster of the week” installment that can’t be truly discussed without spoiling it in some way. So instead I will tell you that what I wrote covers vampirism, mirrors, miming, Isadora Duncan, character actresses, John/Jane Does, and Melissa Leo saying the word fuck in her Oscar acceptance speech.

So if you didn’t have a restful Full Moon/Lunar eclipse the other night, I hope you at the very least got something out of the chaos like I did. Writing experiences like that, where I surrender to my stream-of-consciousness and end up losing track of time, are like precious jewels to me. I wanted to get on record that it happened, last night of all nights, before I get to the real point of this:

I got scans back from the film lab!

These are the first rolls that I’ve gotten developed in 2024—I didn’t actually take too many photos for the first half of the year, but Isaac & I inevitably took a shitload of photos as we drove through thirteen states this summer. By the time we got to Charlottesville I had eight finished rolls, all the exact same make & not labelled.

Financially, getting all eight rolls was not and is not an option right now. When I had a little extra money with my grad school stipend, Isaac & I each picked a roll of film off of what minimal vibes we had & dropped them off at our local lab. The anticipation was genuinely fun! Where would these rolls be from?

The first results: one that spans from December 2023 in Arizona to April 2024 in Idaho, and one from our pre-move trip to visit Isaac’s sister in Oregon.

Thank you so much for reading! If any of this resonated or you’re compelled to read further, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. And if you liked this enough that you want to throw a few bucks my way, you can do so at:

Venmo: Lyd-Havens
CashApp/PayPal: LydHavens

If you feel moved to repost any of my words/photos, I only ask that you credit me. In turn: all photos of me here were taken by Isaac Holladay, my incredible partner.

More soon! xoxo

Hello hello! I told you I’d want to write here more as I use Instagram less & less. I saved this fit check from the other night just for you. :)

I’ve finished my first week of grad school and am simultaneously so excited & so exhausted. My brain isn’t used to retaining this much information day after day, so it’s slowly shifting back into the mindset of a student. I have classes Monday-Wednesday, so I’m currently working on a routine for myself that centers reading & writing on Thursdays/Fridays. This past Thursday I visited a coffee shop only a couple blocks from my house for the first time & found that most of their best seating is on the patio, which was akin to writing in some circle of hell that day. (I am still getting used to the humidity. Ninety-four degrees with over 50% humidity is absolutely wild, my friends. But my hair has never been happier!) I’ll have to return once it cools off.

As I learn my way around town (especially UVA, which is vast & comically beautiful & complicated at first glance), I’m also thinking about what I am here for, which is to write, & to write a book. Many of you know I’ve been working on a manuscript since finishing undergrad, which has, like most someday-books, taken on many different lives already. I’ve been at a fork in the road with my manuscript, Feast Day, for nearly a year now, so I see this as an opportunity to once again start over. Not entirely, but enough to give this some breathing room.

I mean, I started this project when I was 23, & I’m now less than 6 months away from turning 27. I am different! Of course the book will be different, too!

As I write this I have just finished my first poem for my first poetry workshop, answering one of Bhanu Kapil’s twelve questions as presented/answered in The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers. I will not tell you which one I answered for now, but it’s incredible to me how much rose to the surface as I read the book, took notes, & slowly formed my own poem. In the introduction to the book Kapil says that as she interviewed women with these questions & answered them herself the project became a “tilted plane.” I can feel something of a shift right now, too, drawn to angles & precision & a distance my poems might need, after over a decade of being a mostly “confessional” poet. I really do see these next few years as an adventure, so I’m trying to remain open to everything. I want to experiment. I want to find ways for my visual/fiber arts to intersect with my poetry. I want to write poems while cooking again, as I did when this project first came to fruition. I want to start submitting to journals again & write more pieces that may never see the light of day. I see this as a time to try everything I want to at least once, to become more of an inventor, or a mad scientist.

And slowly, our lives are solidifying & stabilizing here. Our art is on the walls, I’ve cooked nearly a month’s worth of dinners in the kitchen, Isaac put a hook up in the living room so I can hang my book-bag after I get home from class. I already know that the stability & structure I will have here will be very good for me, & that just has me excited in a way I haven’t been for a while!

It’s also the first day of September, a month that is historically very heavy with grief for me. To tell you the truth, I didn’t notice it the way I usually have right as I’m waking up on this day. I didn’t notice anything but the calendar. That has me feeling hopeful, too—to be in a new place & not feel what I usually feel. To know, again, that I have grown, that I am different.

Top photo: The twelve questions in Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey St. Press, 2001)
Bottom photo: a tapestry of Chagall’s Still Life, 1912 that I got Isaac for Christmas, next to a painting by his dad

Playlist for August

I’ve been making monthly playlists for over two & a half years now, mostly to have a place to put the songs I have on repeat every month. I don’t give the playlists too many restrictions, but I cap the playlist at 20 songs most months (except from May-August, because I take summer playlists especially serious—then it’s 25) & that I have yet to repeat a song in any playlist since January 2022, though I am not opposed to it happening after nearly three years. I also usually share the playlist to my Instagram at the end of the month, but since I’m not using Instagram for much right now: I get to use the newsletter medium to ramble about these tunes that I like. >:)

This month’s playlist (which you can listen to here) has probably my favorite vibe of any of them so far, especially as my taste has been drawn further into psychedelic rock & jazz-y vibes. It’s a little bit of a journey, & it’d be cool if you listened to most/all of it, but I wanted to highlight some of my favorites from the last month of listening:

• Remi Wolf’s new album was released just before we drove from Idaho to Virginia, so it’s been in heavy rotation since then. “Kangaroo” was one of the first tracks I added to August—it’s got a chorus that makes me want to jump around any open space on the floor, & builds into a bridge that’s just a cacophony of instruments, static, those titular Big Ideas.

• My favorite new (to me) artist this year is Baby Rose, who recently released a soaring, stunning EP produced by BADBADNOTGOOD. Her voice is warm, like a velvet garment in the dryer, as are the orchestral arrangements that back her up. I’ve fixated on a different song from the EP every month since June; in August, it’s been the closer “One Last Dance.” I have not been given a reason to feel the way she sings for a while now, & yet it comes back to me every time I listen. I found myself swaying to it in the hallway recently, feeling every hit on the drums to my core.

• I have not explored Ora Cogan’s discography yet, but “Cowgirl” makes me want to ASAP. To me it sounds very much like the rural stretch of I-79 that connects Northernmost Tucson to the prison town, of Florence, AZ, where there’s nothing but saguaros & sky as far as the eye can see. I love anything that sounds simultaneously psychedelic & twangy, too.

• Now that my partner Isaac & I live together, our tastes are influenced by each other even further than they already were. August’s playlist has a lot of his influence in it—he showed me this banger by the Japanese psychedelic band Kikagaku Moyo, & this ethereal 2005 collaboration from Animal Collective & Vashti Bunyan. Through his uncle Scott, who has the best stereo system I’ve ever seen/heard, we both discovered “Now That We’ve Found Love” by Third World. I’m a big fan of long, bombastic closers, so that has been the last song in August’s playlist since the beginning of the month.

Thank you so much for reading! If any of this resonated or you’re compelled to read further, I hope you’ll consider subscribing. And if you liked this enough that you want to throw a few bucks my way, you can do so at:

Venmo: Lyd-Havens
CashApp/PayPal: LydHavens