Dear Friends,

What if the glitch isn’t a failure?

What if the strange transmission, the missing piece, the unexpected detour isn’t evidence that the system has broken down—but that something we weren’t meant to see is beginning to break through?

We tend to think of glitches as interruptions: moments when technology fails to do what we designed it to do.

But perhaps some glitches are invitations. Or initiations.

In The Palmist, Phoebe has begun encountering them everywhere: in her memory, in her navigation system, in forbidden symbols, in dreams she cannot explain. The machinery of her world keeps insisting that everything is functioning as designed.

And yet something—or someone—is trying to get through.

What happens when the glitch is not in the machine, but in our understanding of ourselves?

In THE FUNHOUSE, Phoebe follows the glitch.

And the sign, Truth Seekers Welcome, is a revelation.

Share

If you missed Part 1: The Oracle

Recap of Part 2: The Seer Inside

In The Seer Inside, Phoebe follows the strange pull of the PALMISTRY sign in the window of a house she had never spied before on her way to work, and discovers a connection between her dream of her mother manipulating DNA, and the mysterious—and forbidden—symbols appearing at the cottage. Meanwhile, Rhea, the artist whose house Phoebe has stumbled upon, discovers that her art reveals truths and faces from beyond her own experience—including, perhaps, Phoebe’s own.

And here’s where things get weirder.

Enter Part 3: WORLD ON EDGE: The Funhouse

Phoebe steps into an invitation no one else can see: TRUTH-SEEKERS WELCOME.

Rhea had already seen—and sketched—the woman with lilac-and-black-streaked curls. Now she understood why she had advertised her presence to the world.

It had been to draw this woman to her.

She went to greet her guest.

Dance of Titans

Beneath the lighted palm, another message of sorts: F-d L-ve in the Palm of M- Hand. The sign was in disrepair: flashing neon letters burnt out.

Phoebe scrutinized the letters and the voids for missed meanings: the first word might be Food. So, a restaurant of some sort? The pang in her belly reminded her that she’d neglected to eat again today.

“Food, then. Yes, that is good,” she muttered into the darkness. “As for the rest—Lime? Liver? Loaves. . .

“LOVE?”

Puzzling.

“And the hand: M for My? But I fail to see. . . .”

As soon as Phoebe emerged from her vehicle, the redhead in the upstairs window, spotlighted against the dark before dawn, disappeared.

In the car, with its artificial lights, her brain was “on,” though her frontal lobes were beginning to hurt. Driving here again, she became aware of another odd sensation. Searching her memory banks, she dredged up a name for it—

SORROW.

Even when Lida died, Phoebe had not recognized it.

Still, she felt drawn to move closer. There was nothing to do but get on with it.

The skies were starting to shed their night shadows. White wisps of cloud passing over a waning crescent moon. Venus, the Sirius-equivalent morning star a-twinkle as the Old Earth moon-facsimile began its final descent. Phoebe lingered beside her idling vehicle, killing time until this heartsickness might pass.

Staring skyward, as if the gods, her ancestors, might leave a message to explain this place. . .this sensation. . .this red-haired “palmist”. Phoebe watched the inky sky for a sign until a billowing cloud bank obliterated the moon.

Phoebe’s energy was draining. She wanted to power away from this spot, but found herself unable to move.

Dawn was beginning to streak the horizon when a woman walked out the door, down a path to the driveway, where Phoebe stood paralyzed. She carried a large sketch pad and charcoal.

“Greetings, Sister. I am Rhea.”

Phoebe warmed to this greeting, though she could not define why. The bellyache returned, along with the thumping in her ears. Tinnitus, she diagnosed it. Her hands clasped protectively over her belly.

“Rhea. You call me ‘Sister’.”

Strangely, though Lida had borne no other daughters than Phoebe, that name felt true.

“Yes. Sister. I am sure of it,” reiterated Rhea. “You are the one I have been waiting for.”

Shifting the pad to her left hand, Rhea offered her right hand in greeting. Phoebe observed it was illustrated, like the sign in the window. In the center of that hand, a ruby.

The Palmist. Wary of this encounter, Phoebe shrank back. “How? We have never met.”

“Perhaps,” Rhea said, pulling open the brown cover from her sketchpad, “you will recognize this.” The fingers on Rhea’s left hand were smudged with charcoal like the drawing stick in her left hand.

The ringing noise in Phoebe’s ears amplified. She heard a voice echoing in her ears: “Beware. All is not what it seems.”

Were the ORACLES warning her?

Frowning, Rhea waved the drawing again, offended, perhaps, that Phoebe had rejected it.

Though cautious, Phoebe couldn’t help but draw near, if only to glimpse the proffered page.

“No. You are not ready!” Rhea reflexively clasped the page back to her bosom. “First, what do you call yourself?”

Phoebe couldn’t help but note the awkward phrasing, the reflexive—“you, yourself.”

Rhea stared at her, her eyes like lasers that could see into Phoebe’s hiddenmost places of the heart, and repeated, “What do you call yourself?”

Phoebe hesitated.

The phrasing was strange. Not What is your name? but, What do you call yourself?

“Phoebe, daughter of Lida.”

At that moment, the sun poked its fire above the horizon.

“Phoebe,” Rhea acknowledged. “Perhaps this drawing will fill in what is missing.”

Missing. Could Rhea somehow fill in her missing pieces? The promise of an answer vibrated somewhere deep inside.

Rhea tore the page out of her sketchpad and held it out to Phoebe. “Look!”

Phoebe glimpsed two women draped in tunics and wearing plumed helmets, one fending off the other, an earth-like orb dangling between them.

She stared at the sketch, then looked from the sketch to how its smudged design had transferred itself to Rhea’s snow white sweater.

“You wear your picture on your breast...”

Rhea stamped her foot in irritation. “Goddess be damned!” She wet her middle finger and tried to rub away the stain, static from the fabric shooting tiny sparks as her fingers worked the wool.

Instead of erasure, the outline smudged, filling in the blank spaces and penetrating deeper into the material.

“An unfortunate accident. Or an act of the Fates?” Phoebe wondered aloud.

The thought occurred to Rhea out of nowhere that, by holding the image to her heart, she had indelibly tattooed Phoebe to her.

Rhea lashed out at her. “No! The Fates did not decree it. I am the Seer, not the Source. But you—look how you have permanently stained my heart!”

Phoebe recoiled, startled by the illogic of Rhea’s sudden angry response.

“Take it! It is yours!”

Rhea angrily threw the drawing in Phoebe’s direction. It helicoptered between them to the ground.

It seemed to Phoebe her sister’s fury arose from nowhere.

Stepping back, Phoebe could not bring herself to fetch the drawing from the driveway, much less bear the burden of this unfounded accusation. After all, they had just connected.

Who was Rhea, really? For that matter, who was Phoebe?

Mental processes tangled; Phoebe fixed her stare at the earth. “I am sorry.”

With a will, Rhea cleared the anger from her aura.

“Let us begin again. I am Rhea, daughter of Lida.”

Begin THE ORACLE →

Coming next: PART FOUR—SISTERS

Phoebe and Rhea enter a dance—and the Fates begin to pull the threads.

Originally appearing in Shapers of Worlds V (2025), a short story anthology published by Shadowpaw Press, this Reading Room edition returns to my original manuscript.

My thanks to editor Edward Willett and Shapers of Worlds V for giving The Palmist its first home. If you’d like to discover the anthology in its original form—including twenty-three other outstanding works of speculative fiction—you can find it through Shadowpaw Press or at your favorite bookseller.

© Robin Stevens Payes, 2025

Continuing the conversation. . .

• Next in The Reading Room: SISTERS (Part 4 of The Palmist)

• From Releasing Memory’s Essay Archives: Writing as Alchemy: What do you do when the invisible insists on being seen?

Your subscription helps me bring these stories home—and gives you access to the growing Reading Room of returned works, author’s cuts, artwork, maps, reflections, and conversations.

Dear Friends,

We’re living through a glitch in time: a world that stops when the power grid is overloaded as temperatures soar. A banking system that fails because a solar flare interrupts satellite communications. A workday interrupted because the internet shuts down.

A human life interrupted by AI.

When the cloud evaporates, we are left with only our human powers. For tens of thousands of years of evolution, that technology saw us through.

What happens when we become so dependent on automation that human life ceases to function without it?

In The Palmist, I imagined that experiment much further down the road.

Phoebe inhabits a world in which the integration of human, machine, and divine intelligence has already happened—or so they all believe.

But the result is hardly seamless. Her world is full of glitches, contradictions, missing pieces, strange transmissions, and beings who aren’t quite what they appear to be.

Perhaps that’s what speculative fiction is good at: giving us enough distance from our own world when it is reflected through a reconstructed—or a deconstructed one.

Share

If you missed Part 1...

In The Oracle, we met Phoebe: a goddess-human-machine hybrid living on a reconstructed Earth orbiting Sirius, struggling with missing pieces of her identity—and with an inability to feel what other humans call love.

Desperate for answers, she summons the ancient Oracle, Pythia. The encounter doesn’t exactly go as planned.

Then, on her way to her first day of work with the New Intelligences Team, Phoebe sees something she cannot explain: a strange house, a raised palm, and a sign that seems to be calling her home.

Phoebe sees the sign. She interprets it as yet another glitch in the program.

Someone unmaking her carefully reconstructed world. Someone who sees things she cannot see—and who may already have seen Phoebe.

Welcome to Part 2: THE SEER INSIDE

When a raised palm is not a Welcome Sign.

No. Phoebe’s eyes were not playing tricks. Palmistry it was.

And there was an orange light flickering in the little window above the garage:

TRUTH-SEEKERS WELCOME.

Phoebe took a mental picture and drove on, not wanting to make an erroneous impression by being late to her first meeting with the NEW INTELLIGENCES TEAM. The TEAM was made up of Old Earth home planeteers, specialists in behavioral programming, and other specialists from far reaches of the galaxy. Many beamed in by holosphere, distances being too great to travel to meet in the same place. Other TEAM members were non-organic neo-sapient life forms, machine-built superintelligences, the outgrowth of high levels of bio-engineering unthinkable even as recently as the previous lightyear.

Phoebe was being brought in to helm its next evolution: to reconstruct the Old Earth-Moon orbiting satellite facsimile. It would be stationed in the old Solar System where Earth had been located. The plan called for tapping into higher evolutionary frequencies to move present-day life forms in the system from basic sapience to Omnipresence. By filling these gaps, the theory went, they could restabilize the weirdly wobbling orbits resulting from Old Earth’s collapse to better maintain a functioning Old Sol system: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus.

The irony of her ascent to leadership wasn’t lost on Phoebe. The NIT had created Phoebe as a prototype: the first human-machine-divine hybrid intended to seed a new cosmic order, her descendancy from dynasties whose names were celestial bodies circling Old Sol, now ascended to new realms.

She personally would deem the project of which she was a prototype to be a failure.

For most of the meeting, she switched off to keep her biases from showing. While the TEAM debated, Phoebe’s mental processors replayed the strange little Old Earth-esque cottage with its charms, symbols and sigils. She was only vaguely aware of their droning until Maira, a denizen of Eris—a distant dwarf planet erratically adrift in Old Sol’s Asteroid Belt—who was participating remotely via holosphere, asked her to give the TEAM a charge. But Phoebe had become so lost in her mental meanderings that it took her an attosecond to switch back “on” in order to utter the final TEAM activation.

They were all looking to her to lead them.

“Exactly. Thank you, Maira. Well done. Now, let’s remember: by striving for the impossible, success becomes possible. So, let’s get started, TEAM! Full-steam ahead,” she sputtered.

She trusted this was a general-enough rallying cry that the TEAM wouldn’t suspect how completely tuned-out she had been.

Their faces showed confusion. She wondered whether she hadn’t been expected to say something more about the mission. But here, in this moment, her memory-banks would not stop replaying the morning’s encounter: that home. Those signs.

An unfamiliar sensation flooded her circuits. She pondered over whether that TRUTH- SEEKERS WELCOME wasn’t an apparition for what she had been seeking: a physical manifestation of the ORACLE.

The day passed. Phoebe’s thoughts looped in herky-jerky orbit, leaving her even more unsettled. She would acclimate herself to routine; she must ward off further surprises, encounters that might lead her off track even more.

She was careful driving home to override the shortcuts feature of her astronav, taking the well-traveled route back to Dome-Sweet Home. But a strange aching sensation seized Phoebe, and a beating in her ears—she attributed it to hunger. The day had been too busy to pause for nutritional supplementation.

Still, she couldn’t detect precisely what ailed her. Her circuits were fried, and these cloud-covered nights had a far less salutary energizing effect on her system. She would need a concentrated energy recharge from her lightbox before morning.

That night, she dreamed. There was her mother Lida, at a desk in an office Phoebe had never seen before. Her mother—a version no older than Phoebe herself—seemed to be laboring over a computer programming challenge. Phoebe was able to see the output on the screen written in a language not of ones and zeroes, but A-T-C-G patterns, the universal life code. Lida was manipulating DNA.

This made no sense—especially since, up-to-now, Phoebe’s dreams had always made sense.

But this dream was lifelike—and mysterious. Lida hadn’t been a programmer. In fact, to Phoebe’s knowledge, she’d never even owned a computer. And her mother certainly had been no expert on the double helix.

Phoebe chalked this dream aberration up to the overstimulation of her day.

She sat in front of the lightbox over breakfast, reviewing the previous day’s passing. Her throat was still raw from the smoky residues wafting out of her experience with The Pythia. She swallowed a brew of salicylic acid, honey and lavender to erase the soreness.

Reenergized, Phoebe set out for work following the same odd route she had the day before. Here was the same old house, and the same hand-shaped, lighted sign: PALMISTRY.

This time, instead of driving by, she stopped. She stared for a moment—the flickering orange sign in the second-story window had been modified to add in an on-off-on-off assortment of blinking symbols in a range of neon colors. Some reminded her of planetary glyphs: Pluto, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn.

Others were new to her.

Looking up into the window above the garage again, she noticed the welcome sign was now lit up in blue and green. And in a detail that had somehow escaped her the day before: beneath it was the double helix.

Her dream. Though she didn’t believe coincidences had any power beyond random association, she felt drawn to investigate.

Perhaps here would be a new piece to unravel the puzzle: what was her purpose?

RHEA

In the beginning, Rhea found her doodles meaningless. The first time she charcoaled the “saluting hand” with the bejewelled palm, it was nothing more than a curiosity. But she found herself creating variations of that open palm over-and-over. Not that she couldn’t stop herself—of course she could. But nothing else satisfied her in the same way.

It had become a familiar sensation. While not a trained artist herself, Rhea could manifest form on the page or canvas adequately. The red-haired woman, the Seer Inside—Rhea came to recognize that spirit, inspirited, inspirator as THE DESIGNER, drawing through her.

In this out-of-mind process of creative expression, images would enter her brain without warning—in fact, they seemed to “push her” outside her body and take over. And when she was given the mental tap to indicate the designer was done, she would reenter her own brain, exhausted, with only a vague sensation of the force moving through her—save the designs left behind. And the Seer Inside displayed a far greater artistry than Rhea would ever manifest on her own.

She speculated it was all in her DNA: her inner artiste jolted awake in a lightning stroke of divine inspiration and infused with intravenous ichor.

As more-and-more of this creative output emerged over time, she began to notice sequences and repetitive symbols, discreet details that appeared in larger works. Such sigils reminded Rhea of legendary logos of long-ago companies she’d studied in art history, with logos that hailed back to Greek myth, like the Nike swoosh, the Starbucks mermaid, or Paramount’s Mount Olympus. The Hamsa was for a firm trading in digital currency.

Under the influence of the Seer, she began experimenting. She tried pastels, changing the gem’s colors with each iteration: ruby red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple. And clear. Clear was her favorite shade—or rather, lifting of shade. It induced clarity, stimulating Sight.

Seeing: this was Rhea’s genius, but also her curse. It revealed itself in swirls of light and dark, line and smudge, color and its absence. Etched into being and unraveling. The pattern so clear.

Rhea’s godlike husband Kronos had overthrown his father Uranus to claim the Cosmos, only to become haunted by the prophecy that one of his own children would someday overthrow him. So he swallowed each child Rhea bore, attempting to devour the future before it could arrive.

Losing her children in this way was more than wrenching. But Rhea saw a way out.

When Zeus was born, she hid him, giving Kronos a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes in his place.

In time, the son Kronos had tried to erase returned to confront him. Zeus forced his father to disgorge the children he had swallowed—Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades and Poseidon—alive, emerging from the darkness one by one. Together, they would overthrow Kronos and begin another order of the Cosmos.

Rhea had seen it coming.

Her artistry often revealed inconvenient truths like this: messages others would obstinately ignore or vehemently deny.

Truths.

Curiously, in each artistic download, the upraised hand would appear. Rhea pulled an old, dusty grimoire sometimes known as a Spell Book—off her shelf. She readily identified the doodle: it was a charm, known as hamsa. It was a symbol of welcome and farewell in many Old Earth cultures and religions. Used to ward off the power of the Evil Eye, a curse borne of jealousy that could inflict harm on others. Superstitions long-since banned.

“Fascinating.” Rhea knew of such curses: her family lineage was rife with harms inflicted by gods and humans alike.

The influx of energy she gained from the work encouraged her to continue. Rhea began adding rare galactic materials to her creations: crystalline elements, metallics, and gas-derived pigments mined from the Old Sol Asteroid Belt: diamond, ruby, moonstone, lapis, gold, platinum, neon, argon, krypton.

Illumination.

Assessing her output, time-after-time, though she herself was energized, her work seemed oddly static. Rhea would breathe life into her opus! She decided to set her designs in motion by adding fresh animation techniques.

The process filled her with joy. Still, the designs themselves meant nothing.

Early the morning Phoebe drove past, Rhea had had an inspiration: she would advertise her artistry to the world outside. As the output of her handiwork grew, she’d extract a single element to showcase outside her studio, beckoning to the world beyond the second-story window.

She saw Phoebe’s car idling and was amused. “Enter and be charmed!” She must prepare her home to welcome the friend, welcome the stranger. To welcome her kin, should they deign to come inside.

She sorted through her proliferation of paintings, sculptures and holograms, setting them out haphazardly around her studio. If she were to organize a showing. . . Rhea began to note how each work revealed clues from outside her own experience. Increasingly, they were faces. And while each facial depiction was different, they did have one thing in common: the faces on the page would eventually show up in her life.

Like today.

Read THE ORACLE →

Coming next: PART THREE—WORLD ON EDGE

Phoebe steps into an invitation no one else can see: TRUTH-SEEKERS WELCOME.

Originally appearing in Shapers of Worlds V (2025), a short story anthology published by Shadowpaw Press, this Reading Room edition returns to my original manuscript.

My thanks to editor Edward Willett and Shapers of Worlds V for giving The Palmist its first home. If you’d like to discover the anthology in its original form—including twenty-three other outstanding works of speculative fiction—you can find it through Shadowpaw Press or at your favorite bookseller.

© Robin Stevens Payes, 2025

Continuing the conversation. . .

• Next in The Reading Room: WORLD ON EDGE (Part 3 of The Palmist)

• From the essay archives: A STORYKEEPERS CODE: What we hold on to, what we release, and what we hope to pass forward

Your subscription helps me bring these stories home—and gives you access to the growing Reading Room of returned works, author’s cuts, artwork, maps, reflections, and conversations.

Originally appearing in Shapers of Worlds V (2025), a short story anthology, published by Shadowpaw Press, this Reading Room edition returns to my original manuscript, restoring passages and themes that later evolved in the published version, along with new reflections written for this serialization.

Dear Friends,

When my first granddaughter was born, I found myself writing not a lullaby but a myth.

Holding that tiny new life in my arms, I silently repeated the Buddhist Metta prayer: May you be safe. May you be free from suffering. May you be filled with joy.

Then another image came to me: the hamsa, the open palm from my own Jewish tradition, long associated with protection and blessing. It is less a talisman than a reminder of the kind of world I hoped she—and all our children—might inherit.

The blessing eventually found its way into this story. The Palmist imagines two futures growing from the choices we are making now. Set on a human colony orbiting Sirius, it follows Phoebe, a goddess-cyborg hybrid who believes herself incomplete, until the appearance of a mysterious palmist forces her to question everything she has been told about memory, ancestry, and what it means to be human.

I offer it now as a love letter—and an invitation to consider what we are passing on.

©Robin Stevens Payes, 2025

THE PALMIST

Subscribe now

PART 1—THE ORACLE

Phoebe was missing pieces in her life. She knew her lineage was long, but shrouded in mystery. Here, on Old Earth Replica, after 33 Earth-simulated sun cycles, she might be ready to confront the truth.

To reveal the mysteries, Phoebe had decided to seek consultation with The Pythia, one of the ancient Oracles at Delphi—now available in AI-rendering and known as ORACLE of the Second Cosmic Cycle, or ORACLES.

Phoebe’s decision to seek the Seer was a last resort. She didn’t hold to the ancient mind reading myths, but she was at wits’ end. Tapping into her lineage, perhaps The Pythia would reveal some hidden prophecy that could fill in all her missing pieces.

She lived on a reconstructed Earth orbiting Sirius after the destruction of the original planet. In her domed abode, whose exterior projected ever-changing scenes, she sat cross-legged, meditation-style on her cushion, atop a virtual Mount Parnassus. Outside her home she projected ever-changing scenes of a mythical Earth that had once been home to gods, humans, wildlife and gardens: an African savannah, Egypt’s pyramids, the hanging gardens of Babylon, the Great Library at Alexandria, the Grand Cathedrals of Europe, the Statue of Liberty.

Each of the outside panoramas formed part of her story. She hailed from the gods, fell into the trance of human being, then was transformed by auto-technology, preserving both life codes within one body. A prefab world in which to play out her prefab life.

Deep down, she felt she was none of these—not goddess, not human, not cyborg. Like the prefab visions outside her dome, she was a post-fabrication, haunted by Old Earth’s warring and loving, sinister and auspicious dualities.

She longed to reclaim whatever vestige in her was still human.

Yes, she was lucky: still here. Her mother Lida’s voice repeated in a loop reminding her of her good fortune. Her mother insisting, “Never dare question the Fates.”

But being here did not diminish the fear that things were not right. Doubt dogged her through life, and yet she had no direct experience of events shaping it. Only this virtual view.

Disease had been conquered. Eternity was at hand—and it was far from paradise. Reduced to consuming simulations of suffering, Phoebe wondered whether loneliness itself had become humanity’s last disease.

She sought relief. She underwent tune-ups and tests, consumed snake oil concoctions combining ancient Old Earth herbal remedies with cutting edge sonic- and electro-molecular treatments. They infused her neural circuits with sweet memories and deleted bad dreams.

Robo-healers diagnosed her to be in tiptop performance condition. They informed her the deficit was a defect in her original mental processors and urged her to see a neurotechnologist who specialized in de-shadowing mental mechanisms.

And yet, here she was—seeking ORACLES’ answer to the immortal question: who am I?

Phoebe had previously gone to considerable lengths to research this scientifically—the “Science of Myth/Myth of Science” being her graduate dissertation topic. She had sifted through the Cloud of Memory but found no thread from which to weave a Tapestry of Phoebe.

She used to think her failure to feel was an accident of birth. After all, her mother hadn’t been exactly sober most of the time she was pregnant with her.

Phoebe exhausted the medical research on fetal alcohol syndrome. It couldn’t account for her quirky “on-off” mental modalities. In the “off” mode she could still think and calculate. What disappeared was emotional retrieval. Reading hearts—that’s where the trouble lay when switched off.

Being “on” was like the beam of a lighthouse cutting through the fog, lighting up personal memory. Clarity came flooding in on a super signal.

Even so, her switched-on brain seemed to be missing another faculty that never seemed difficult for others. The word they used—LOVE.

She once made the mistake of confiding in her mother about this odd on/off ability, once Lida got sober—and stayed that way for the next twenty-one years. Immediately, Lida denied there was anything special about Phoebe, advised her daughter to keep her mouth shut and went upstairs to bed, even though it was the middle of the day.

Phoebe didn’t see anything aberrant in her mother’s behavior. Or her own. This was just the way things worked. She relished being the one-of-a-kind product of a one-of-a-kind woman.

Until Lida’s tragic death came—a lightning strike, a bolt out of the blue—brought on when her mother was sampling the nectar of the gods, mead and honey, at The Café Paradiso (before sobriety, she had been a regular at this Mount Olympus landmark). It had been the smallest lapse. Heart attack, the autopsy said.

But that was ages ago.

Not one to short circuit after news of her mother’s demise, Phoebe uploaded the data into the cloud and moved on.

Still there were puzzling pieces she couldn’t fathom, even from the “on-brain” position. She needed a higher processor. Perhaps ORACLES held the answer. Phoebe hoped they might conjure up her singular prophesy to help her access her human side. Emotion. She’d heard it defined as a thought linked to a sensation in the body. Somehow, she’d missed that “feelings” gene.

ORACLES existed everywhere and nowhere at once. From beneath her BuckyFuller-simulated geodesic dome, Phoebe could summon Delphi with a thought. Yet, in this pre-dawn moment, firing up the Delphi simulation, she had trouble tuning in. Interference from Sirius sometimes disrupted the simulation.

She kept on trying. What mattered was the guidance. Trekking up a virtual Mount Parnassus to the cave, The Pythia was there welcoming her. Phoebe asked the Oracle to conjure a prophecy.

Instead, the vision flickered and faded. A hazy Pythia shimmered into being, now sitting cross-legged on a rock and gazing into a smoking cauldron giving off astringent scents Phoebe couldn’t discern, this redolence not being a usual feature on the New Earth.

Her own eyes began to burn, her throat rough. “P-P-Pythia!” she heard herself stuttering the oracle’s name.

“What is your request?” Pythia asked mechanically, her bleary eyes, unseeing.

“I am Phoebe, daughter of Lida. I beg you, grant me insight,” Phoebe implored, “to feel my heart of hearts!”

“It is always the same with you,” The Pythia moaned.

Phoebe blinked. “But I’ve never asked. . .”

The Pythia’s head was lost in the swirl of smoke. “The matter is out of my control,” she muttered.

The heavens above Parnassus spangled into starry night. On Old Earth’s horizon, an aurora borealis waved. Overhead, the Big Dipper shot an arrow straight into the North Star. A meteor fell down the sky.

“Sweet dreams, Enchantress/ Inheritress of illumination and substance/Echo of all prior forms/Foremother of what is to be,” The Pythia incanted, her voice mollifying Phoebe.

Until, in a flash, the connection was severed.

Frustrated, Phoebe tried to jumpstart the vision again, to no avail. Her cosmic query, her heart of hearts, remained unanswered, day after day after day. The magnetic interference was too great to sustain the connection.

Perhaps it is not meant to be, she reasoned, as she had on many previous occasions.

“But where has the time gone?” she said to no one, noting that, outside her dome, dawn was beginning to break. “I mustn’t be late this first day.”

Phoebe pulled her silver-coated sheath over her new work uniform and glanced at her reflection in the two-way mirror near the door. The lapis streaks in her hair shimmered with gold in the glow of the holographic dawn reflected from the images outside her dome.

Her pale skin was flawless. She pursed her lips, painting them with white gloss and, satisfied, donned her new silver moonglow sunglasses, then strode to her vehicle.

To get to her new job, she started out by following an unusual route. She didn’t give it a second thought; her internal astronavigation normally chose the quickest route.

Except in her turned-off mode. Then all bets were off.

En route to the new gig, she passed by an old faux-Normandy cottage she hadn’t noticed previously. The house had an attached garage topped by what must have been a mother-in-law suite. There was a hand-shaped sign posted on the sloping lawn. PALMISTRY, it read.

The sign looked like a hamsa, an upraised palm inset with a ruby eye. The hand of Fatima, to ward off evil.

But such symbols had been outlawed long ago.

Phoebe made a mental note—if it was, indeed, a charm, she would have to report it to the relevant Ministry of Rational Truths; but perhaps her eyes were playing a trick? Or, more likely, a typographical error. Was it meant to read PSALMISTRY?

She wasn’t even sure what that would have meant. Another form of oracle? Superstitious beliefs and practices were taboo here.

But she did love music and had become enraptured with the harmonies of the human voice participating in choir at the highly selective Stardust Academy. Phoebe wondered if, perhaps, this was a place where they sang psalms. She’d learned these melodies before they became outlawed. The psalms had become a form of awakening for her, those stories of love and longing. She’d committed many to memory.

This strange sign was arresting for some reason. Phoebe slowly backed up her hydrogen-powered mobile transporter to look again.

No. Her eyes were not playing tricks. Palmistry it was.

And there was an orange light flickering in the little window above the garage:

TRUTH-SEEKERS WELCOME.

—

Coming next: PART TWO—THE SEER

Phoebe steps into an invitation no one else can see: TRUTH-SEEKERS WELCOME.

My thanks to editor Edward Willett and Shapers of Worlds V for giving The Palmist its first home. If you’d like to discover the anthology in its original form—including twenty-three other outstanding works of speculative fiction—you can find it through Shadowpaw Press or at your favorite bookseller.

Continuing the conversation. . .

• Next in The Reading Room: THE SEER (Part II of The Palmist)

• From the essay archives: “A Lesson in Days”

While The Palmist explores memory through speculative fiction, "A Lesson in Days" considers the same questions from everyday life. I hope you'll read them together.

Share

Dear Friends,

As copyrights return to me, so, too, do the stories.

Releasing Memory has always been—and will always be—a place of reflection. In my essays, poems, and writings here, I am always searching for ways to retrieve, to recreate some measure of what has passed—not to ruminate, but to elevate.

Lately, as I have been packing up twenty-three years of life in one house and preparing to move to another, I have found myself sorting not only photographs and keepsakes, but pieces of my writing life. Wondering what to save. Wondering what to release. Wondering what still has something new to say.

There is so much to unravel in the release of memory. That remains the centerpiece of this chronicle.

But there are other memories worth revisiting.

Over many years of writing poems, essays, articles, short stories, novels, and now memoir, I have watched many of those works go out into the world through journals, anthologies, collections, educational publishers, and books. As time passes, publication rights often revert to the author.

The stories come home.

Rather than letting them quietly disappear into out-of-print anthologies or forgotten corners of the internet, I'd like to welcome them home—and introduce them to a new generation of readers.

I've also discovered that stories, like people, reveal themselves differently at different moments in life. Perhaps you have found this, too.

Returning to them years later, I find things I could not have seen when I first wrote them. They deserve not simply to be reprinted, but to be reencountered.

That is the inspiration behind The Reading Room, a new section of Releasing Memory devoted to previously published work finding a second life.

Share

We'll begin with THE PALMIST, a mythic space opera about memory, identity, and what remains human in an age of artificial intelligence. First published in Shapers of Worlds V (2025), it follows Phoebe, a woman descended from Titan goddesses, who discovers that the greatest mystery is not the future—but herself.

For The Reading Room, I've returned to my original manuscript, written as I was becoming a grandmother for the first time.

Every story, of course, opens with a single sentence.

This one begins:

“Phoebe was missing pieces in her life. She knew her lineage was long, but shrouded in mystery. Here, on Old Earth Replica (OE), after thirty-three Earth-simulated sun cycles, she might be ready to confront the truth.”

Its return also gives me the opportunity to share the story differently than I could in an anthology. These are not simply reprints. Each work returns in conversation with the person I was when I first wrote it—and the person I have become since.

As each work returns, I’ll be adapting it thoughtfully for serialization here on Substack and sharing many of the things that never fit between the covers of a book or anthology: author’s notes, maps, artwork, backstory, outtakes, reflections, and conversations written with the benefit of time. And the author’s voice.

If you already own the anthology or book in which a work first appeared, wonderful. If not, those original editions will still be available through booksellers. I will add a link at the bottom of each post where you can find them.

But here in The Reading Room, you’ll encounter these works in a new way—living stories still unfolding in the present.

To begin, Part One of THE PALMIST, “THE ORACLE,” will be free and open to everyone. Future installments will begin with a free preview before continuing for paid subscribers.

Because I treasure this community and the conversations we’ve built together, I plan to keep comments open to everyone. The stories themselves will help support my work as a writer; the conversation will remain a shared space.

You can think of The Reading Room as another room in the house of Releasing Memory.

The front door remains open, just as it always has. Essays, reflections, poems, and conversations will continue to be freely shared with all.

But if you’d like to step into the library with me—to revisit stories as they come home, and to help sustain the work of bringing them into the world anew—I would be delighted to welcome you. And to hear your thoughts, in return.

Releasing memory together.

With gratitude,

Robin

Share

When I first posted a version of this essay on Edge of Yesterday on July 4, 2014, we lived in a different world. Yet the questions that inspired it remain.

As we mark our nation’s 250th year, I find myself returning not to today’s headlines but to enduring principles—and to the work still before us.

It is up to We the People to preserve what we hold most dear and to continue forming “a more perfect Union” for our children, and for theirs.

Re-membering One Nation, Indivisible

Like the nation the founders imagined—imperfect from the beginning, yet animated by aspiration—we are still too often caught in the paradigm of me versus you, “Us” versus “Them”.

Factionalism flourishes when we forget how deeply our lives are intertwined. Freedom cannot endure if we see one another only as adversaries rather than fellow citizens, neighbors, and human beings.

Thomas Jefferson pledged “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” Those words remain worth remembering. Tyranny does not always arrive by force. It can also take root wherever fear eclipses curiosity, certainty silences dialogue, and power replaces understanding.

Too often, whether as individuals or nations, we reach first for coercion rather than cooperation, for domination rather than diplomacy. We invest extraordinary resources preparing for conflict while investing comparatively little in the slower work of reconciliation, education, and peacebuilding.

Shame rarely transforms people. More often, it hardens them.

As Dr. Brené Brown’s research has shown, shame and blame encourage us to armor ourselves rather than connect with one another. Communities—and even nations—can fall into the same pattern.

Can we instead cultivate personal responsibility, empathy, and the courage to remain open? A growing body of research suggests that practices such as mindfulness, creativity, play, music, literature, and the arts help us strengthen those very capacities. They are not luxuries. They are part of the civic infrastructure of a healthy society.

Beyond our individual identities and national boundaries lies a deeper truth: our futures are intertwined. The work before us is not simply defeating enemies but repairing relationships—with one another, with history, and with the living world that sustains us.

After all, we are all people seeking safety, dignity, purpose, and belonging on the same small, fragile planet. Cooperation does not erase our differences. It gives us a way to live with them.

That kind of freedom requires a shift in perspective. It asks us to see another person’s struggle not as their problem but as something that, sooner or later, touches us all.

Lincoln once observed that the Declaration did not merely announce independence; it gave the world “a standard maxim for free society”—a truth to be continually approximated, even if never perfectly attained.

That work is still ours.

Freedom is not simply something we inherit. It is something we practice—in how we listen, how we care, how we repair, and how we remember our shared humanity.

This Independence Day, I find myself returning to a simple question.

What picture do we choose?

Do we continue seeing a world divided into us and them? Or do we remember that we belong to one another?

Every generation inherits a promise.

Every generation decides what it will make of it.

The Declaration of Independence tells us where we began. In the same spirit, The Declaration of Responsibility and Interdependence asks where we might go from here.

What if we widened the lens? What if we planted seeds whose harvest we may never see, trusting that generations yet unborn will inherit not only our freedoms but also our responsibilities?

Written with that hope for the future, the Declaration of Responsibility and Interdependence begins:

We the Peoples of the Planet Earth declare that all life is One.

I hope you’ll read it and consider what kind of ancestors we hope to become.

https://thedeclaration.org/

Dear Friends,

Some time ago, I had the strongest sensation of connecting with my daughter’s baby-in-waiting, a mental quickening. Let’s call it a dream. (It was not). She was then 36 weeks-in-utero. I kept expecting the phone to ring to let me know my daughter was in labor.

But no, not yet.

I had a brief mental picture of the world into which this baby is being born: Chaotic. Breaking. On fire.

I asked her if she knew what she was getting into.

“I know,” she told me. “Here, there is mystery. And reckonings. Forgetting and remembering.”

Share

On the verge of giving birth, her second pregnancy, Anne Hathaway (Agnes Shakespeare) could see it—at her deathbed her two children would be by her side.

And yet, even with this knowing, life would unspool in unexpected ways.

There is not much on the record about Agnes: birth, marriage, children, death. The usual church records of account for a seventeenth-century Englishwoman.

Hamnet brings us her spirit. Shakespeare’s wife had uncanny abilities, the gifts of a healer. A seer. A life lived off the Globe stage. But very much on a stage of her own.

It is her story that demands our attention in this time.

Maggie O’Farrell’s tale is fiction, of course, since women’s lives were not considered worthy of documenting, unless they were royals. Even Shakespeare’s women were played by men on stage.

As Hamnet writes Agnes into life, the author imagines a spirited woman who lives in a fully-realized world beyond what mere records hold. She shows us what was true for many women in everyday Elizabethan England, creating a tale of birth and death, marriage and home, love and tragedy, poverty and pestilence.

Like Agnes, I don’t know how I know things. I just do.

You see, I have just found, in the weeds of one of my many journals, a long-forgotten 2010 entry that reads like this:

I believe I can see into the future—I glimpsed what seemed to be a short time from now where I had grandchildren (three, or four)—I don’t know if these were my sons’ or my daughter’s kids, or whose, but they definitely were/are/exist/will be.

I breathe into the mystery, even as my thinking brain seeks out answers.

Eastern philosophers speak of the Akashic records—a vast library that contains all possibilities, past-present-future. It can be understood as an invisible web of all of time—every record. Every detail. A Book of Life.

Modern physics offers its own mysteries: a universe in which information appears woven into reality in ways we do not yet fully understand.

At the time of that journal entry, sixteen years ago, my children were 24, 21, and 16, respectively. None of them had serious partners at that stage—it would be another nine years before my older son would marry.

And yet. . .now, I am about to become a grandmother for the third time.

I have been forgetting and remembering.

In O’Farrell’s tellings, Agnes Hathaway is an odd one. She tames hawks. Raises herbs and flowers. Whispers to trees. And feels in to people’s bodies, their ailments, to create just the right healing compounds.

In public, town’s folk count her a witch. In private, they seek her cures.

After they marry, Will himself erupts in exasperation at Agnes’s uncanny insights, saying it is both a blessing and a curse to be married to, “Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself.”

Uncannily, she possesses that same sense into herself.

After finishing the film, the play, the book, I came away with a foretelling of my own. Because, in truth, witnessing how Agnes’s intuition plays out, it is the tale of the children that sticks in me.

Through Agnes, we get this:

“She is with child, she feels. There will be another baby in the house by the end of winter. [Agnes] has always known how many children she will have. She has foreknowledge of this: she knows there will be two children of hers standing at the bed when she dies. And here is the second child now, its first sign, its very beginning.”

Shaped by this foresight, when her second pregnancy delivers her twins, she feels a new foreboding:

“She remembers with ice-cold clarity the image she had of two figures at the foot of the bed where she will meet her end. She now knows that it’s possible, more than possible that one of her children will die... But she will not have it. She will not. She will fill this child, these children, with life. She will place herself between them and the door leading out...”

In O’Farrell’s retelling, her uncanny insight—and trust of her intuition—reveals a possibility that Agnes could not see for the shadows that hid her future: a child taken too soon—the plague sparing two young lives, Susannah and Judith, but not the boy, Judith’s twin.

Not Hamnet.

At the time of giving birth, she understood none of this.

Her knowingness was not all-knowing.

In a world narrowed by fear, ignorance and punishment, this woman, Agnes, lived fiercely into her gifts of knowing, of seeing—and even so, she was forced to grapple with the consequences of all she could not foresee.

In the end, Agnes’s knowing is embodied. She concocts remedies from herbs and plants. She listens to trees. Her hands feel for disease, and reach for cures.

In her day, healers trusted what they could read from nature. Sometimes, they would feel it in their bones.

Sometimes, it would punch them in the gut.

Our bodies often register information before conscious thought catches up.

The information, when it reaches our brain, must be interpreted. It may reflect past circumstances. Discernment is necessary.

And the filtering process that sorts gut intuition with what our brains know to be true often requires tapping into our hearts to respond in kind.

There may be lag times.

Even with this, I recall an earlier, darker impression. A pregnancy that ended in miscarriage at sixteen weeks. A baby, Belle. About whom I received this, in another knowing:

I’m very sorry.
This was not her time.
Tell your daughter to have heart.
All will be well.
Belle is looking out for her and them.

When this new soul came to me that night, I had to ask: What of that other baby?

I knew her in passing. Belle is busy elsewhere.

I felt her quickening.

She said no more but kept nudging my knowing with her spirit. “Indomitable” is the word I heard, but I don’t know if that came from her, or from an ancestor I have been researching.

I woke up with the feeling of finding a new family connection. A new part of our family constellation.

A great tragedy cannot be undone by the birth of more children.

And perhaps it is better that we don’t know what we cannot know. Seeing everything the future holds for us would stop us from living.

Agnes tried mightily to save her Judith from death. She applied all her healing arts and none more so than the mightiest act of all. Love.

And something more: free will.

In Hamnet, had Judith’s twin not vowed to switch places with his sister, to save her from death, what then? In the echo of a game they played as children, he hid himself in her place and bade Fate to choose him.

This was something Agnes could never foresee.

Out of such loss could yet come an act of re-creation. In O’Farrell’s telling, the death of Hamnet, and the depth of grief, of grieving—not just his mother’s, but his father’s as well—led to the creation of one of the greatest stage tragedies of all time, William Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Hamlet.

Love created new life. Not perfectly. Not a replacement.

But enough to go on.

Baby-to-be indeed has a big sister, P. who, though she came five weeks early, came out strong. Healthy. And now, she is a very engaging, busy, soon-to-be big sister, almost 20 months old.

P. doesn’t know what’s in store. How her life is about to change.

In fact, what the story of Hamnet shows is none of us do.

Here, there is forgetting. And remembering.

A quiet coda

On the birth of new granddaughter V.

Welcome, sweet baby girl, who’s arrived in her own good time. To a family awaiting you with open arms and love—whatever comes. And to your dear mama and daddy, and big sister P.

If there is one thing Hamnet understands, it is this: knowing is never the opposite of uncertainty.

We may glimpse possibilities. We may feel into the energy of all possibility before it arrives. Always, life asks us to meet it as it comes—holding open our hands, minds, and hearts.

In this way, there is a certain comfort in not knowing, that we know we can welcome whatever may come. To continue to create. And to wonder into becoming.

The future remains a mystery. It requires our being prepared to meet whatever comes our way. And our willingness to love our way into it.

Dear Friends,

As I continue working on my ancestor memoir-in-progress, [re]member the world, I find myself thinking about the mothers who raised us, the foremothers whose stories were never told, and the parts of ourselves still waiting to be born.

Lately I’ve been returning to an essay I first drafted around Mother’s Day. Revisiting it now, I realize it isn’t really about a holiday. It’s about the lifelong work of becoming—and helping others become—who they are meant to be.

In a glistening midtown Manhattan skyscraper one bright spring morning a year ago, I sit in a meeting hall filled with young people who could be my own children—or, in some dimension, my former selves. They are students, scientists, storytellers, dreamers.

I am there as a mentor in Columbia University’s Youth in STEM program, invited to speak about possibility, though I know that what I really want to tell them is something more elusive: how possibility is never finished. How each time we believe we have outlived our purpose, life finds another way to call us back onstage.

Watching these bright young high school students, as I have for so many years now, I sense the nervous hum of rehearsal—the same nervous energy that used to course through me before the curtain rose. They will be pitching a startup later in the day—a business plan they’ve been working on all year—to a panel of seasoned professionals, me included. We have rubrics for evaluation, firm criteria for choosing, and a tough task ahead: recognizing one team out of twelve total for all-round excellence.

It is their first act.

The first act of my life played in earnest: eager student, striving professional, wife, mother. Then came Act Two: unraveling, heartbreak, reconstruction of what remained.

And now, in this, my Third Act, I am learning how to play the roles I once only imagined—mentor, witness, midwife of story.

Decades ago, I’d walked into a small community theater certain I no longer belonged. It had been decades since I’d last acted on stage. Auditioning for “Hay Fever,” I felt the old energy surge through me: knees quaking; voice quivering. British playwright Noel Coward’s witty, stinging lines lifting from the diaphragm, passing through lips, teeth, and tongue. His dialog landing with the precision of an arrow, unlocking the memory of other stages, other auditions, something that made me persist—some lost girl who once believed in the alchemy that happens when you embody someone else’s words, making them yours.

Our leading lady, Jane, entered rehearsals late—she was playing My Fair Lady across town. A seasoned actress, effortlessly elegant, she seemed to possess everything I had forfeited—grace, certainty, command. I feared her and wanted to be her, which may be the same thing.

Instead of rivalry, she offered curiosity. Between scenes, she would ask about my life as if I were worth knowing. Gradually, our stories began to reveal a palimpsest of rewritten scripts: we had followed similar arcs in political work, in higher education, in television.

“We’ve lived parallel lives,” she laughed one day, and I felt as if we had rehearsed these parts across lifetimes.

That play became a hinge between what was past and what could still be. Onstage, I embraced again the pulse of creative life—the one I had put aside while raising children, holding together a marriage frayed, work that prioritized productivity over passion. I began to raise something older and deeper: the woman who had been waiting in the wings.

It took more years—a new stage—to hear my wider calling. After the theatre came authoring a science fiction book series for young adults, and after writing came the question of why I was writing, and for whom.

I began to listen again to the whispers of women’s stories, starting with my grandmother’s—Sophie, the Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant whose migration trauma was silenced before she ever set foot in America. Her absence began to speak through me, a blank page where a lineage should have been, filling with the difficult story of a difficult migration from Old World to New.

Through my work on Releasing Memory and [re]member the world, I started to sense that what I was really doing was raising the mothers: giving voice to the generations who had been erased, buried, or forgotten.

The act of telling their stories became an act of self-creation. Each poem, each letter, each performance was a breath returning to a body that thought it had expired. I realized that the mothers we think we raise—the daughters we imagine we become—are all part of the same continuum of care. To mentor, to mother, to make art: each is a gesture of faith in the future.

Raising the mothers, I was beginning to understand, was never only about mothers. It was about anyone entrusted with another person’s becoming.

That understanding deepened when I began mentoring young people in STEM and the arts. I saw in their ambition a joy—brilliant, impatient, afraid of failing. They could embrace many things at once. Each time I encouraged one to claim her creative voice, I felt another layer of my own hesitation peel away.

This year, on the eve of becoming a grandmother for the third time, I find myself savoring both motherhood and grandmothership. We are gathered around my daughter and her husband, part of the support system for TEAM P—soon to become a big sister.

We form a living family constellation, unfolding and enfolding across generations.

We live in a culture that rewards beginnings but mistrusts continuations. Yet I have learned that life’s deepest artistry lies in returning enlarged by experience. The mother whose silenced dreams can now emerge. The actress who forgot her lines can still find her voice. The daughter who mourned the silence of her foremothers can still learn to listen.

In that sense, the Third Act is not a coda but a crescendo. It is the place where the separate melodies of our lives—career, family, heartbreak, artistry—find harmony. It’s where the personal becomes collective, where one woman’s story of survival becomes a song for many.

Back in that Manhattan meeting room, a student lingers after my talk. A young person in transition between what the world sees and what they want to become confides a passion for astrophysics, a career in the Space Force, and poetry. A young person bound by ancestral expectations, yet torn in body, mind, and spirit to carve out a new path.

The world echoes their parents’ advice: choose the sure thing. Follow tradition.

“Do you agree?” I ask.

A hesitation, a smile. “Maybe not.”

We stand together at a window on the twenty-first floor overlooking the city and for a moment it feels like rehearsal again—the curtain just about to rise.

“Listen to what is calling you,” I urge. “The world needs every voice you have.”

Many voices ring out. I think of Jane. I think of Sophie. I think of my granddaughters. I think of all the women whose stories thread through mine, unseen but alive beneath the surface.

And I understand: raising the mothers was never about going back. It is about tending what remains—these invisible mycelial roots of memory and imagination—so that the next generation can bloom taller, wilder, freer.

The curtain never truly falls. We only learn, with time, how to step once more into the light.

To learn more about the Youth in STEM program, I invite you to read “Time Travel Tourism.”

Creativity rarely travels unchanged from one generation to the next. The mediums evolve. The questions remain.

Several years back, as part of my Edge of Yesterday book series and “STEAM learning through story platform,” I recorded a conversation with my son Ben Payes about music, imagination, and the mysterious ways creative ideas arrive. At the time, I was gathering interviews for Edge of Yesterday with modern-day polymaths—people whose curiosity spilled across disciplines, from art and science to storytelling and invention.

A lifelong Beatles fan, Ben traces one of his earliest musical inspirations to Eleanor Rigby, a song that revealed how music and storytelling can work together to create something larger than either alone. In our conversation, we explore songwriting, dreams, heartbreak, creativity, and the way a song often begins not with words, but with a feeling.

One of my favorite moments is our discussion of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday,” which famously arrived in a dream under the working title “Scrambled Eggs.” Creativity, Ben suggests, often begins this way—not as a finished product, but as something sensed before it is understood.

Since then, his own creative journey has continued to evolve. What began with writing and performing has expanded into arranging, recording, and producing music.

Today he balances family, fatherhood, work, health, and an ongoing commitment to making art with his indie rock band, Clones of Clones.

For a fresh take, listen to their latest release, All In My Head.

The craft evolves. The gift endures. Perhaps that is another twist to the question of who gets to remain creative.

Not those who master a single form.

Those who keep listening for the next idea when it arrives.

Our conversation explores how those creative ideas arrive. This earlier essay asks a related question: if creativity is our birthright, who gets to remain creative?

And how do you know if that’s you?

Dear Friends,

Releasing Memory is a literary newsletter exploring ancestry, memory, and the human stories we carry across generations—and how those stories are remembered, reshaped, and passed on.

If you’ve been reading Releasing Memory for a while, thank you.

If you’re new here, welcome.

Today’s piece turns to creativity: not as the property of a gifted few, but as a birthright we are all born into—and, sometimes, taught to forget.

What is Art?

My late mother, Dorothy Stevens, a painter and sculptor, posed this question to everyone she knew. It would drive her family and friends crazy.

In her mind, it wasn’t an academic question. It was aesthetic. And reflective of the rarified world of “art experts,” who could make or break an artist’s career at auction, and whose judgments shaped what would be bought, sold, and resold among “some of the most important art collectors of the past half-century.”

If she were with us today, she’d be railing against the notion that a Jackson Pollock canvas could fetch $181 million (as has happened this week with his “Number 7A, 1948”)—because it was a “Jackson Pollock.”

To Mom, if it looked like something made by a three-year-old splashing paint on the page, it could not fall into the same category as a Rembrandt, or even a Dali, and certainly not a Michelangelo—artists who studied technique, sketched cartoons before ever encountering the canvas, who practiced and labored over their masterworks, with an eye to perfecting them.

My mother was less interested in dismissing Pollock than in challenging the machinery that transforms one artist into a nine-figure commodity while countless others labor in obscurity.

What she would think about today’s AI-generated “art”—designs produced in an instant without the touch of hand to canvas or clay—is not hard to imagine. “A machine cannot think, feel, sense or imagine,” I can almost hear her say. “Creating something meaningful requires the head and the heart.”

Beneath my mother’s question—What is art?—was another, more democratic one: Who gets to decide?

Her answer was radical in its simplicity. Not critics. Not auction houses. Not markets.

Us.

Ordinary people, if given the opportunity to look closely and trust what they see.

I have come to ask a different question.

Who gets to be creative?

My question is neither academic, nor aesthetic. It is about what is passed down. In the genes or on top of them.

And before I hear anyone say there’s something wrong with looking to genetic inheritance—a creativity gene—let me say LOUDLY—balderdash! I believe we are born to create—born into creation, to be precise.

It is our birthright, not our exception.

And until the age of five, or so, there is ample evidence of this. When I lead workshops for adults, or readers of my Edge of Yesterday teen time travel adventure book series—a time travel launched when a GenZ teen re-creates what she thinks is the Renaissance genius’s design for a time machine, I often begin with The Paperclip Experiment, also known as the Alternate Uses Test.1

And inevitably, the groans come up.

“I’m not creative.”

“I’m blocked creatively.”

“My job doesn’t reward creativity.”

Turns out, the modest paperclip is a great way to test your creativity quotient.

It goes like this: pick up a paperclip. How many unconventional ways can you think of to use it?

To begin: set a timer for two minutes (no cheating on time, or using AI!) Note all the uses you can think of.

If you’re inspired, I’d love to see some of your ideas in the comments.

This experiment is an actual research experiment designed to test creativity. Your Creative IQ can be measured as a result of the originality, range and number of responses you came up with.

What group(s) do you think consistently show the most creative thinking?2

If 98 percent of five-year-olds possess genius-level creativity, then creativity is not the exception. It is the starting point.

The real question is not whether we are born creative, but how that capacity is nurtured or neglected—and how, in some families, it survives long enough to be passed on in ever-changing forms from one generation to the next.

I’m seeing, through this, how my question needs to evolve. It’s not so much who gets to be creative—that is a gift we all possess—but who gets to remain creative.

The Muse, like DNA, recombines.

In our family, that instinct has taken different forms in each generation.

• My mother worked in paint and clay, ink and ceramic.

• I’ve found my expression through stories and poems, theatre and dance.

In the next generation, the creative impulse has taken many forms: painting and sculpture, creative nonfiction, music and photography, jewelry design, therapeutic insight, and novel solutions to complex problems.

The medium—and how inspiration manifests—changes.

In a conversation I once recorded with my singer-songwriter son Ben about music and storytelling, he described songwriting not as the translation of ideas into form, but as the creation of a mood first—something felt before it is understood. The words come later, if they come at all. What mattered most was not precision, but permission: to follow what emerges.

That philosophy became audible in a piece he later composed for my Edge of Yesterday series—“Leo,” his musical story translation.

The inheritance remains.

Who gets to remain creative?

If creativity is our birthright, nurture is the key to protecting and reopening that gift.

Too often, schools, jobs, and cultural expectations train us to seek the correct answer rather than the surprising one.

Yet the creative impulse is remarkably durable.

In the age of AI, it remains one of the most profound markers of our humanity. Machines may mimic the products of creativity, but they cannot inhabit the consciousness, memory, longing, and love from which meaningful art arises.

(And Mom, I hope this rings true for you from beyond the veil!)

With curiosity, encouragement, and permission to play, that impulse can be rekindled at any age.

How are you making space for creativity in your own life?

And what tools are you placing in the hands of those who will inherit the world after you?

If creativity begins in nearly all of us, then something happens along the way—not a loss of ability, but a narrowing of permission.

Which brings me back to the question at the center of this piece:

Who gets to remain creative?

And what would it take for us—individually and collectively—to remember that we already are?

In a future post, I’ll share a conversation with Ben about dreams, songwriting, and the mysterious ways creative ideas arrive.

Complement this piece with a deeper dive into the question, "What Is Art”—and how Dorothy Stevens navigated an “art world” designed for men, and how and why she opted not to play the “fame game.”

Releasing Memory is a literary newsletter exploring ancestry, memory, the human stories we carry across generations, and how those stories get told. As part of National Poetry Month, Mornings with Daisy celebrates the companionship of a furry friend.

Subscribe now

Dear Friends,

I love to play with pattern—rhyme and meter, structure and return.

Even more, I love playing with words themselves: arranging and rearranging them, tracing their origins, listening to how they move in the mouth.

Mornings with Daisy takes the form of a sestina, a pattern built on repetition and return. The form comes to us from the troubadours of 12th-century southern France—wandering poets who composed and recomposed their verses in courts and along the road. The word troubadour is often traced to the Occitan trobar: to invent, to compose, to find.

To find—and to make—through language.
To circle back, and in the circling, to see differently.

The troubadours were known to challenge one another, each striving for greater intricacy and invention. This poem comes from a quieter impulse. Not to outdo, but to return.

To the small, repeated gestures that shape a life: a season turning, a body waking, a soft paw against the cheek at morning.

With thanks to for introducing me to this beautifully recursive form.

Mornings with Daisy 
The hour before seven

She who never kisses wakes me by paw tap
Each morning the same—just around seven
Or six if Daylight Savings Time has begun
Earlier still, as time stretches into midsummer
Sleep lessened as a day’s length stretches
By the fall equinox the process reverses

As autumn advances, my inner clock reverses
Anticipating awakening in advance of any tap
Lengthening darkness lingers as night stretches
I lift my head to check for six, six-fifteen, seven
To remind her how kisses aren’t mere midsummer
Dreams that cease as our fall to winter is begun

Less quick to wake me, tho’ her bathing’s begun
The licking of the paws, her ritual cleansing reverses
Goldenrod replacing the pollens of midsummer
She scratches, I sneeze from her gentle paw tap
And turn again, tho’ my clock’s struck seven
Rub my eyes under dimmer skies, her stretches

Match mine—we arch in slow, achy, creaky stretches
Relishing an added hour when Standard Time’s begun
The clock never lies until the moment six turns seven
Again, a cycle of seasons brings day-night reverses
Waking early, I wonder if it’s my turn now to tap
Or to leave her sleep longer, longing for midsummer

Longing also for sleep, my inner clock midsummer
Stuck tho’ darkness lingers later, winter’s stretches
Elongating, snuggling under duvet, discouraging tap
Curled up now beside me, such cold that’s begun
To seep into my bones. Bodies’ warming reverses

The unceasing cold and darkness at seven
So warm and inviting, illuminating midsummer
That seasonal cycle set through night-day reverses
Hard to believe those light-filled stretches
Could ever diminish once summer was begun
When both Daisy and I would relish her tap

Cocooned beneath covers, I wait for her small tap near seven
She knows, as I do, how each day newly begun still reverses
Carrying out midsummer warmth in late-fall morning stretches.

For those who share my love of verse and its many variations, I invite you to read and listen to other pattern-word plays. A pantoum, the spirit of ‘26.

And how to choose the most vivid storytelling, a prose poem/lyric poem interplay, Hand Me Down the Tree of Life, or A Hand on Velvet.

EARTH DAY 2026: EARTH WINS

Dear Friends,

I have been tracing democracy through story and stone, through voices raised and histories remembered.

But here, in the quiet persistence of a river system—and the species that sustain it—I begin to see another truth: democracy, too, flows.

Subscribe now

Who would ever have thought it would be endangered mussels that could stop ICE?

Not muscles—the blunt force of power—but the quieter force of people, of pressure, of persistence.

The green floater mussel and the brook floater mussel—two threatened species native to Maryland—live downstream from an abandoned, 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Hagerstown.

As all consequences do.

The building was purchased by the federal government for $102.4 million in January, just six months after it had been refinanced at $76.8 million. A further $115 million contract—potentially expanding to $641 million—was awarded to defense contractor-turned-prison developer KVG LLC to convert the site into a detention facility projected to hold up to 1,500 people.

But the mussels remain.

They anchor themselves in the riverbed, in Antietam Creek, a gorge that once ran red with the blood of an America at war with itself; its whitewaters washing away war’s traces.

In a quieter way, amid calmer days, these mussels continue the work of filtering the waters of the Potomac River—waters that flow onward into the Chesapeake Bay.

What happens here does not stay here.

It moves.

It carries.

It accumulates.

During a packed April 15 hearing in Baltimore, State Attorney Jeffrey Goldstein argued that wastewater from the proposed facility could overwhelm local infrastructure, sending pollution downstream and threatening protected species.

In the courtroom, the question was procedural: whether proper environmental review had been conducted.

Outside, the question felt older.

What does it mean to build a system designed to contain human lives, if in doing so we endanger the systems that sustain all life?

The mussels cannot speak. But their presence—fragile, persistent, downstream—has forced a pause in a system built for speed.

And in that pause, something else has emerged: the possibility that even now, even here, the story can be interrupted.

I am writing into that interruption.

The asymmetry is striking: a federal system engineered for speed, for stealth—money, authority, scale—moving to construct a facility designed to contain human beings labeled “alien,” set against the quiet persistence of a native species that cannot move, cannot speak, cannot leave.

The green floater and the brook floater abide.

They are not incidental to the system.

They are the system’s quiet keepers.

By the time we gathered in Baltimore, the waters had already entered the conversation.

It was a clear, sunny morning in downtown Baltimore. Early temperatures in the 70s that would later climb above 90—unusual for mid-April in the mid-Atlantic.

Security was provided by DHS. One of the officers even offered a cheery “Good morning!” as we walked past.

I was there in protest of a proposed new ICE detention center near Hagerstown, Maryland, being pushed forward without proper environmental studies or permitting—a case brought in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.

I marveled at how many of us showed up en masse on a weekday morning—Income Tax Day, no less—for the rally before the hearing.

The mood was joyful.

The Rapid Response Choir led hundreds of gathered Marylanders in song. Drummers kept the beat. Speakers rang the alarm with urgency and conviction.

People carried signs—some defiant, some irreverent—while voices rose in chant and song. Two rabbis wore T-shirts reading: “Resisting Tyrants since Pharaoh.”

I mentioned to a friend how much the scene reminded me of the Vietnam protests of the late ’60s and early ’70s. The only things missing were the braids, bell bottoms, tie-dye—and the peace buttons.

Our buttons were more literal: NO ICE.

Speakers from the ACLU, CASA Maryland, and NAACP reminded us that we are a nation of immigrants—our family, friends, and neighbors. People like us. Calling us to remain vigilant when rights are at risk. To use our voices.

Afterward, we filed into Judge Hurson’s U.S. District courtroom.

The mood shifted.

We were there to witness the law in action. Not as spectacle. As interruption.

Judge Hurson reminded us that the legal proceeding would focus on whether the State of Maryland had standing to challenge the federal government’s redevelopment of a former logistics warehouse under the National Environmental Policy Act.

At issue was whether the government had adequately assessed environmental impacts.

The warehouse currently holds four bathrooms. Its environmental review—apparently cursory—did not account for the wastewater demands of up to 1,500 detainees.

In a break with decorum, when the proceedings concluded, the courtroom broke into applause twice: first, when the judge noted the civility of both sides; and second, when he thanked the public for respecting the process.

I offer a silent third round of applause for the mussels.

In these dark days, hope emerges through witnessing—through showing up, paying attention, and taking part.

Not hope for a return to the status quo. Because history does not return. It evolves—through what we recognize, what we lose, and what we choose to carry forward.

We tend to think of land as primary—of borders, walls, and what can be contained.

But life begins elsewhere.

In water.

In what flows between us, beneath us, beyond us.

The mussels know this. They survive only when the water is flowing, when the system holds.

And so do we.

Before we build systems that strain what sustains us.

Democracy, I am beginning to understand, is not only built in halls of government or spoken from stages.

It lives wherever we recognize that what happens upstream flows toward us all.

I am writing this as an ancestor.

Because what we allow, what we protect, what we choose to set in motion, will shape the waters our grandchildren inherit.

And whether they, too, will be able to stand, to gather, to speak. And to belong.

Complement this with these previous posts in the Hope for Democracy series

And on how waters sustain us:

In Releasing Memory, I share essays, poetry, and works-in-progress that honor ancestral story, lived experience, and the future we imagine together.

In Releasing Memory, I share essays, poetry, and works-in-progress that honor ancestral story, lived experience, and the future we imagine together. Grateful for longtime readers.

New here? Join for free to read and engage—or support with a paid subscription to help memory take deeper root.

Subscribe now

Dear Friends,

In 2022, when Find Me in the Time Before, the fourth book in my Edge of Yesterday teen time-travel adventure series was published, I was thrilled to receive a wonderful review from a middle grade fiction book blog, Always in the Middle. Reviewer Elliott Kurta wrote, “Much like Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief, a sarcastic and whip-smart narrator sets this book apart as a teen novel.”

Of course, for Charley to be compared to the popular Percy Jackson—and being a girl hero to-boot—is a joy. But what stuck with me, as the author, is the blog title, Always in the Middle. It’s a feature of that demographic between elementary and high school, of course. A time of searching for identity. Of being neither here-nor-there.

We’ve all been in that messy middle.

But take away the pre-adolescent messiness of youth that is neither kid nor adult, and I’ve been seeing how being in “the messy middle” isn’t just for preteens. It is a term you could apply to any age—one’s 20s, on becoming adults but not quite settled in. Or one’s 50s, in the beginning throes of middle age. And even for those of us making the transition between middle age and—whatever comes next.

I’ve found myself thrown back to that awkward feeling of late. No, not sudden growth spurts or hormones out of control. No one is asking me what I want to be when I grow up now. And thank God, I’m no longer scared about needing to fit in or being cast out of the in-kids.

I have been in transition—between life stages. Between roles and responsibilities. Between projects and passions.

Thinking about how to stay in the moment between endings and beginnings without panicking over what comes next. It’s also true in the Zeitgeist.

It’s true in my creative pursuits.

There comes a moment in any act of making—any life in transition—when you realize you are no longer at the beginning, and not yet anywhere near the end. I’m completing my now five-book Edge of Yesterday time travels, with the final edits to Struck by Stars underway. It’s a bittersweet feeling, having spent the past decade channeling Charley’s “whip-smart” sassiness onto the page for my young readers. Not just because these characters feel alive to me, but because I’ve had some amazing opportunities to interact with my readers—and learn how inspired and inspiring they are.

And yet it’s very satisfying to bring the series to a close under my own hand. To be able to write THE END.

But life is not a book with a neat beginning, middle, and end. It twists and turns in unpredictable ways.

Now, as readers of Releasing Memory will be aware, I am turning to this new project, ancestor memoir, and the inspiration of a whole new audience of potential readers. [re]member the world is a story that is still unspooling in threads. And some of those threads are being tied here.

But the threads, in their myriad of colors and lengths, of times and places, have not yet come together to form the full picture.

The scaffolding of what was; that has been loosened.

The clarity of what will be; it has not yet arrived.

I am in the middle.

Messy.

Unresolved.

Alive.

Hard to lean in to something that is just a potential right now. Or, I should say, having multiple potentials. In quantum physics, potential is best understood as a mathematical map of energy that dictates how particles move and where they are likely to be found.

In storytelling, it is the possibility for a story to reveal itself in any one of a number of ways depending on where the narrative moves, forks, disrupts or continues. Think “Choose Your Own Adventure.”

In weaving a story together, the middle is not where the pattern reveals itself. It is where the pattern complicates.

Threads that once ran clean begin to cross.

Colors deepen, clash, soften, return.

What seemed decided demands revisiting.

I unweave.

I reweave.

Tension must be adjusted—again and again—so the fabric does not warp under its own becoming.

From the front, there are only hints. A suggestion of form. A gesture toward images emerging. Hints of shadow. And light.

From the back, another story entirely.

Knots.
Tangles.
Loose ends.

Strands carried across distances that make no sense.

Wild.

Unordered.

Necessary.

This is the stage where technique—if ever I had one to begin with—starts to fall away. What I thought the story was about begins to reveal a different pattern. A new narrative thread emerges.

And sometimes recedes.

What takes over are the hands that have learned through practice and repetition.

Through error. Through trial. Through time.

In my grandmother’s time, women’s hands would be practiced at threading. They would know by heart or by sight when to pull tight and when to leave slack.

I learned this in writing about the tallit bag my mother’s father’s mother embroidered before he left the shtetl. And the daily chores, the dinners, the family gossip that would have accompanied the practice.

These are hands that can feel the tensile strength of a thread before it breaks.

This is what I have been musing over as I move through my own middle—in writing, in life, in the long unfolding of Releasing Memory.

Not the clean arc of a story told in hindsight but the lived experience of being inside it. Where what holds is not always what you expect. And what bleeds away may be something you once thought essential.

We expect to value beginnings and endings. The spark. The resolution.

But the middle is where the work actually happens.

It is where:

• the pattern becomes more complex

• earlier threads are revisited and reworked

• tensions are adjusted so the fabric holds

It is also where you cannot yet see the full design.

The story doesn’t announce itself with a whip-smart sarcastic voice, like Percy Jackson. Or Charley.

Like life itself, it unfolds in pieces. Dark nights illuminated by the crack of dawn. Revelation and silence.

And still—this is the most structurally important place. There is a kind of knowing that emerges here. Not conceptual. Not strategic.

Somatic.

A listening through the hands. A sensing into what wants to hold, and what must be released.

We might call it intuition. Or practice.

Call it mastery, of sorts. Not mastery as control but as relationship—a sensing into what is beginning to emerge and trusting in what is weaving itself.

In this middle space, I find myself asking:

• What remains when certainty falls away?

• What is strong enough to bear tension?

• What is asking to be loosened, untangled, or let go?

Outside, the world feels loud, unstable, insistent.

Inside, the work continues—quietly.

Thread by thread.

Word by word.

Memory by memory, unspooling erratically.

Unpredictably.

Frustratingly elusive.

I pause.
I attune.
I wonder: what is essential?

Inspiration may come as a whisper between breaths.

If you find yourself here too—between what was and what is not yet—you are not lost. (In this, I seek to reassure myself.)

You are in the making.

The middle may be messy. It may resist coherence. It may ask more of you than you feel ready to give.

I pause.
I attune.
I wonder: what is essential?

Not the full pattern. Not yet.

Just this thread. This tension. This small act of attention.

Complement this piece by reading Hand Me Down the Tree of Life or A Hand on Velvet—a revealed story of a tallit bag, and the woman who stitched it together with loving hands.

Lech lecha. Go forth.

Our ancestors crossed forests, deserts, oceans.
We cross another wilderness—
the landscape of memory.

To remember
is another way of coming home.

Welcome.

Releasing Memory is a literary newsletter exploring ancestry, memory, and the human stories we carry across generations.

Dear readers,

Whether you’re new here or have been walking alongside this project for some time, welcome.

Releasing Memory began as a personal inquiry into family history—into the life of my grandmother Sophie, a Jewish immigrant who arrived in America in 1893 from a small Ukrainian shtetl. Like many women of her generation, she left few written traces behind. Yet the echoes of her life remain.

Thank you for being here.

Releasing Memory is a place to look just beyond ourselves—and just within: a journey into the heart.

What begins with a single life or a single family rarely stays there. Over time, I began to see that this search was not only about my grandmother’s story, or even my own.

Across cultures and continents, many of us are asking the same questions: What have we inherited—memory, trauma, resilience, silence, stories, joy, love—and what will we carry forward?

This space is devoted to that shared search we share.

Why subscribe?

If these questions resonate with you, you may find a home here.

Releasing Memory is a place for essays, poems, and reflections that explore how personal stories connect to larger human ones—across generations, cultures, and time. Some pieces follow the unfolding story of my grandmother’s journey from a Ukrainian shtetl to America. Others look outward, toward history, memory, creativity, and the ways we make meaning from what we inherit.

Together, they form an ongoing conversation about remembering: what we carry, what we repair, and what we pass forward.

Your comments, likes, shares and subscriptions sustain, and help it grow.

For paid subscribers

Your support helps sustain this work and the deeper research, writing, and storytelling behind it. Paid subscribers make it possible to continue exploring these histories and sharing them with the wider community.

Readers often arrive here slowly—through a shared post, a quiet recommendation, or a moment of personal searching for a response to your own inheritance. However you found your way here, welcome.

What readers are saying

“Thanks to Robin Payes for her stellar writing and humanity, and for introducing me to new ideas and new ways of writing.” ~Beth L. Gainer, artist and essayist, The Art of Self Care newsletter

“In Releasing Memory, Robin Payes traces the movement from personal story into the wider field of lineage—where memoir becomes a conversation with ancestry.” ~Deborah Gregory, poet and memoirist, The Liberated Sheep newsletter

“Robin Payes writes beautifully about the shock of memory—how a song, a season, or a simple object can suddenly return us to another time.” ~Betsy Maloney, Roots and Vines newsletter

“I am enjoying Robin’s thought-provoking pieces on AI that remind us of all that has gone before.” ~Audrey Lennox, writer

I’m also honored that Releasing Memory has been recommended by The Auraist, a curated literary Substack read by writers, editors, agents, and academics who seek out exceptional prose.

Most essays here remain free to read. Subscribing simply ensures new reflections arrive in your inbox.

More than a subscription,

your support is a form of participation

in this shared act of remembering.

Start here. . .

If you’re new—or even if you’ve been reading for some time—you might begin with a few pieces readers have found especially resonant.

On memory and ancestry
Where the journey into family story begins.

• Unearthing the Past. Digging through old family stories may shed new light on our own.

• Ghostwriter. How stars and stories synchronized to expose a family secret.

• Say Her Name: Sophie. Revealing in verse the fragments of my Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant grandmother’s life as told to me.

On history and witness
How memory meets the larger currents of history.

• Lessons from Nuremberg. What Nuremberg Warns Us About the Seductions of Authoritarianism.

• Beauty, Love and War through the Female Gaze. Lee Miller bucked convention, to photograph at the front during WWII. Her lens reveals a crushing humanity.

On art, memory, AI and our human future
What creativity and technology reveal about being human.

• Writing as Alchemy. When the invisible comes to light.

• The Heart of the Machine. An occasional series to set out an evolving human-AI contract for remembering.

• Remembering in the Age of Machines. A Map for Memory, Legacy, and Ethical AI Engagement.

On art as resistance
Why storytelling matters in times that demand courage.

• She Dared, We Remember. On speaking up and speaking out.

• Tending the Inner Soil. When the world feels so heavy upon us, how do we resist despair?

Join me on this journey. . .

Wherever you are on this path—whether tracing family history, reflecting on the past, or simply listening for the quieter stories that shape our lives—you belong here.

Sometimes those stories include our furry friends. Daisy and Olive indulge in their own unique form of inner listening. Which usually includes settling in where the sun shines warmest.

Thank you for sharing in the joy of remembering.

I’m grateful you’re here.

Warmly,

Robin

Dear friends, old and new,

I have been writing—and sharing—about women’s impact in the arts, science, and literature for young people as part of my YA time-travel adventure series, Edge of Yesterday.

The accompanying “learning through story” interactive platform showcases stories created by Edge of Yesterday’s talented high school and college interns. The “Heroes of History” section features interviews conducted by Charley, the series’ time-traveling protagonist, with some of the polymaths she meets along the way.”1

Last year, for International Women’s History Day, I honored my grandmother Sophie in the poem, Say Her Name, published in New Verse News and now nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

This year, dear readers, I invite you to explore some of these upstanders whose lives I have explored through my writing—and in life.

Across centuries, many women carried their work through upheaval—across borders, across revolutions, across the quiet erasures of history.

Polymaths, Creators, Upstanders: Say Their Names

Émilie, the Marquise du Châtelet: Enlightenment mathematician, philosopher and physicist who laid the foundations for modern science. She was a wife, mother and, quite publicly, the consort of Voltaire. Along with her many accomplishments, she should have also been credited with discovery of the infrared, an honor given 70 years later to Sir William Herschel.

Zora Neale Hurston: Anthropologist, author, and “Queen of the Harlem Renaissance,” she led many lives: novelist, playwright, anthropologist, maid, manicurist, voodoo apprentice, counterrevolutionary, trailblazer.

Zelda Fitzgerald: The Jazz Age author, dancer, artist and trend-setting fashionista of the Roaring ‘20s was often eclipsed by the star of her husband, author F. Scott Fitzgerald, for whom she served as muse—and sometimes found he scooped source material from her own writing.

Judith Leyster: Among the men celebrated as Dutch Master painters in the Age of Rembrandt, one accomplished woman artist cultivated a reputation for innovation, and a "brand" that was uniquely hers.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun: When French royal portrait artist Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painted Marie-Antoinette in 1778, and later became official royal portraitist and close friend of the queen, she could hardly have known that her neck was on the line. Literally.

Isabella d’Este: Renaissance ruler, diplomat, promoter of girls’ education, and a foremost patron of the arts in the Renaissance, she set about leading the peace through beauty and culture.

Hedy Lamarr: The twentieth century saw the rise of Hollywood and the Atomic Age. One star fit them both. Hedy Lamarr, actress known as “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World,” was a serious inventor and engineer, who built the systems that would later be used in GPS, wi-fi and Bluetooth—and gave the plans to the U.S. Navy for the war effort to track German submarines in World War II.

Frida Kahlo: One of the most influential Latina painters of the twentieth century almost never became an artist. A childhood was riddled with medical troubles, including polio, possible spina bifida and a bus accident at the age of six that left her permanently disabled.

It’s thought that experience might have originally turned her interest to medicine. While recovering from injuries that rendered Frida bedridden, she began to paint. Among other things, Frida's work grappling with the triumphs, failings and politics of the body are reflected in her art.

Dorothy Silverstein Stevens: Painter, sculptor, ceramicist, mini-memoirs writer, playwright and teacher, whose work over a lifetime spanning the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries continually circled the question, “What is art?” (And, author’s point of pride, my mother).

And so we say their names.

Famous or not, their names belong in history.

This list barely scratches the surface. Women’s history does not belong to March alone. It lives in the legacies passed quietly from teacher to student, artist to apprentice, mother to daughter.

One day, one month is not enough. Their stories continue—whenever we remember them, and whenever we tell them forward.

Friends, old and new, welcome.

I have just returned from a writing retreat in the beautiful Catoctin Mountains of Maryland. For me, it is a place not too far from home that brings respite from the too-muchness of our times. And since writing can be such a lonely endeavor, participating in a writing retreat offers a chance to find kinship in the company of other creators.

I arrived with a broken left wrist, forced to slow down. Feeling winter in my bones. A southpaw unable to write even my name, I turned to dictation—oral storytelling for the page. For me, a new and different way to call in the muse.

Slowed to listening, I found the mountains speaking back. Somehow, words come easier when I’m steeped in their balm and beauty.

And lately, it is the wildflowers that have spoken to me, even browned, burrowed and buried under winter’s blanket. And after a quiet encounter years earlier, it is the Aster flower that has implanted itself in my imagination.

I first met the Aster at Zigbone Farm in September, 2024, during a forest bathing walk led by poet Melanie Choukas-Bradley, a naturalist and guide who shares stories of the wild. What I thought was a single flower revealed itself as many-in-one— a composite bloom, each petal its own small star.

I returned to Zigbone this winter for a Hive writing residency, deepening work on [Re]member the World, my ancestor memoir-in-progress. Asters, now covered in snow, revealed another truth: what looks like ruined remnants above ground is shelter and promise below.

I recently read these companion poems back-to-back at Zigbone. They trace a shift—from admiring independence to recognizing interdependence—and may find their way into [Re]member the World in some form.

I bring them to this page wondering how they might speak to you.

Not Like the Aster
Curled up in my windowsill
overlooking fog-covering
mountain—lifting. Greens
tinged with red and brown.
Asters, everywhere. Asters
are many-in-one flowers,
I’ve learned. Their petals,
each one a flower. Festooned
medallions at center, 
with a crowning array. 
It’s how Aster
propagates, each to itself,
unlike us. I admire their
independence. Cleaner
than our own messy,
human entanglements.
Our games: “Should I, should I
not”, as Love is cooling, icing
up, cracking; too stiff to bend.
O, to bend like the river birch
whose bark peels away to
nakedness, who sheds
limbs easily even while
shooting new sprouts,
leaves waving merrily
in the breeze, roots
shooting to underground
stream, drinking in eddies,
thirstily gulping up life.
But we—we forsake
thirst to satisfy Love, tho’
Love’s pursuit may lead
to poisoned wells when
Love begins to stink.
Not like the Aster at all.

Penned at Zigbone Farm
Sabillasville, Maryland
September 26, 2024

Like the Aster, Never Alone
A swirl of snow,
Bombogenesis
they call it.
I am again tucked into
blue mountains, a phantom
ridge cresting rolling farmland
dressed in white and fog and ice.
Asters blanketed, resting
inside the memory of
many-in-one flowers—
dried stalks—winter shelter
for bees and wasps to huddle
inside their hollow, dead stems
and caterpillars, whose larva
will pupate in nearby ground,
spiders and beetles embraced
within its stalks. Or the Eastern black
swallowtail, Papilio polyxenes,
a summer batman of a butterfly 
mimicking its doppelgänger–
that one deadly to birds—
its winter slumber in a chrysalis
nesting against Aster’s dead stems,
clinging for dear life. Waiting out
the storm under Aster’s residues. 
A wonder how each phantom petal
knows Spring’s unfurling becomes 
each one a flower? How does Aster
weather the white whirling flakes
billowing around its brittle
medallions that shape its heart, 
barely bearing, barely breathing?
Does it recognize this sky covering
crystalline snowflake—six-pointed, 
singular, its fall congealing into ground?
One floating. One rooting from seed.
I admire Aster’s letting go.
Trusting the turn in season
without fear of extinction.
Entangled below ground—
no, “to be’s or not to be’s.” Accepting
Nature’s cooling, icing up; a petaled
Persephone under ice.
While we, nestled indoors—
we wonder: if we were Aster,
or Aster us, how would we
wait to slake our thirst? To
trust the passing of the storm?
To extend caring roots into
mycelial darkness?
To be like the Aster—
Never alone.

Penned at Zigbone Farm
Sabillasville, Maryland
February 21, 2026

Writing a poem isn’t always a Shakespearean tangle of rhyme and word scheme. For more poetics at play, see how you can turn your shopping list into something else.

Releasing Memory is an ancestor memoir written in fragments: poems, prose, objects, documents, and acts of listening. It is an attempt to hear across time—through what was preserved, what was broken, and what was handed down without words.

This work moves between forms because memory itself does. Some things arrive in line breaks. Others insist on breath, paragraph, and drift.

Below are two versions of the same encounter: a verse poem and a prose poem, each shaped around the same ancestral object—a hand-stitched velvet bag made to hold a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl.

I’m sharing them side by side, not as drafts versus revisions, but as two different ways of listening. I’m curious which one speaks to you—and how.

Share

I. Verse

Hand Me Down the Tree of Life

The black velvet bag in a gold-rimmed shadow box
backed by rose damask on my rose-painted wall,
light resting where hands once worried the velvet’s nap.

It still carries the pressure of a folded prayer, 
a holy weight, the patience of busy hands
breathing sacred memory into cloth.

Red, yellow, lavender — blue faded into time —
thread learning how to age without vanishing.
And this is when I imagine her, the creator—ИK—

My great grandmother, a woman counting the world 
in tiny, crossed stitches, needle biting dark, releasing light,
a ladder to the Heavens, midrash stitched, not spoken.

Perhaps it is evening when she takes out her sewing.
The table finally cleared, cabbage steam still breathing
into the corners of the room, boiled onions savory sweet.

Her daughter natters on, as young girls will talk with their mammas,
stitching tomorrow out of small observations. Loshon hora!
I saw them talking together. A crumb dropped as question mark.

Yetta listens with her hands. Needle crossing dark, hitting the mark,
pulling light through resistance, wearing down the nap.
Gossip passes between them the way thread passes through velvet

Her hands weaving tales. Passing time.

A crown rises ‘neath her fingers, not weighted by gravity 
Branches hold their balance without touching.
Vessels wait to be filled or broken.

Brothers newly arrived in America, letters home bespeak gold.
Abe, remaining son, still invests in home, in shtetl futures
as the long horizon spins out ahead: betrothed, husband, patriarch.

I lean close to peer into the glass—a shadow mirrored back
a faint version of myself inside her sacred geometry —
a face threaded into the pattern by accident or inheritance.

A story in stitches. Letters reverse themselves into breath:
not N but eta, a sound my mouth knows not how to hold.
Yetta. Of course. Will she see me writing back?

Her hands weaving tales. Weaving me.

II. Prose Poem

A Hand on Velvet

A hand on velvet.

Unknown initials stitched in red.

A prayer breathed into cloth.

She glowed, an afterimage: a reflection in the glass, phone in hand—the writer’s tool. A small, rose-hued metal rectangle swallowing a larger one, framed in gold. Hearth and home: 1885 blazing after supper, shadows dancing. 2026 always on, never dark. There sat a mother, stitching, her daughter, exclaiming with each silent stab of needle, the seamstress’s tool, into a velvet prayer bag one day to contain a sacred silk tallit, gossip (the women’s weapon of cut and connection) threading the air. Her twice-great granddaughter—me—taking in the household scene, on the outside, looking in, wistful: write it down. Include the lamp smelling of kerosene that spills a soft yellow light over the black void, red and gold and blue threads poking through. Wishing I could pass through the glass and join them. My prayer? To put an ear inside their murmurs, their sharing of their day. I would caress my mother’s father’s mother’s worn, worried, wrinkled cheek. Through the long gaze of my phone in glass, she glowed—we glowed. Looking in. Flesh screened, seen pressed under glass. Looking out. Inside an afterimage.

I’m interested in how these land for you.

You might notice that one version slows you down, or that another opens something harder to name. You might prefer one—or feel the need for both.

If you feel so inclined, I’d love to hear:

• which version stayed with you longer

• where you felt yourself entering the scene

• or what surprised you about the difference

You don’t need the right words. Attention is enough.

In Releasing Memory, I share essays, poetry, and works-in-progress that honor ancestral story, lived experience, and the future we imagine together. Grateful for longtime readers.

New here? Join for free to read and engage—or support with a paid subscription to help memory take deeper root.

In Releasing Memory, I share essays, poetry, and works-in-progress that honor ancestral story, lived experience, and the future we imagine together. Grateful for longtime readers.

New here? Welcome! Join the conversation for free—or support with a paid subscription to help memory take deeper root.

Subscribe now

It can no longer be a mystery that we are living through chaos and rapid change. The world is splitting along fault lines of power, belonging, and meaning. For some, this rupture opens genuine possibility: the chance to create something more just, more spacious, more faithful to the promise of liberty and justice for all.

For others, fear is the fuel. Fear that power is slipping from an iron grip. Fear that old hierarchies are dissolving. Fear of losing dominance rather than losing dignity. And fear, when mobilized, does not merely defend—it seeks to control, to punish, to harden.

To live inside this divide is disorienting. It demands discernment, steadiness, and a nervous system capable of holding contradiction without collapse.

Last summer, as a way of navigating this terrain, I began a daily practice—On Finding Joy in Our Times—and invited others into it. The responses have been quietly radiant. Sharing joy in community restores perspective, reminds us what remains alive and worth protecting, and keeps the human field from shrinking into fear.

But seeking joy does not mean closing our eyes to what is happening around us. It does not mean bypassing cruelty, misogyny, racialized hatred, or the deliberate stoking of violence as a tool to bring dissent to heel. Joy is not anesthesia. It is not denial. It is not retreat.

At times like these, esprit du mal—the spirit of harm, domination, and degradation—must be named if it is to be confronted. We must be willing to look it squarely in the face and say, clearly and without equivocation: Not in our house.

Only what is faced can be transformed.

And here is the tension I am consciously practicing this year: even as we name and resist what corrodes the human commons, we must also actively cultivate esprit de corps—the spirit of mutual care, shared responsibility, and collective belonging. We seed joy not as escapism, but as preparation: tending the soil so that when the right season arrives, something humane can still take root and flower.

This tension—between clear-eyed witnessing and active hope—is what shaped the poem below.

I chose the pantoum form precisely because of the way it loops, doubles back, and slowly alters meaning through repetition. What begins as a stable phrase can, through recurrence and recontextualization, reveal something entirely different. The form mirrors the way narratives—personal, cultural, national—get told, retold, distorted, and sometimes reclaimed.

The Spirit of ’26 was written in this charged field of tension, with the intent of looking our country squarely in the face and saying: This is not who we are.

SPIRIT OF '26

people mocking—not me, but my country
whipping up violence against citizens
chaos communicated in the register of Truth
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching

whipping up violence against citizens
capitalism co-opted
ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching
citizens outraged

capitalism co-opted
rising samizdat voices—news on its knees
citizens outraged
support the spirit of ‘26

rising samizdat voices—news on its knees
chaos communicated in the register of Truth
unleash the spirit of ‘26
STOP MOCKING MY COUNTRY.

The pantoum originated as a folk form of interwoven quatrains in fifteenth-century Malaysia and was later adapted in the West by French Romantic poets such as Baudelaire and Victor Hugo. Its defining feature is repetition: lines reappear in new positions, subtly shifting their meaning as the poem unfolds.

What first sparked this poem for me was a simple, unsettled question: What is happening to us? Your own starting point might be entirely different. You might write about the loss of a friend and the way searching for them led you somewhere unexpected. You might return to a childhood memory and notice what changes when it’s told again.

If you’d like to try writing a pantoum yourself, here’s the basic line scheme:

Line 1

Line 2

Line 3

Line 4

Line 2

Line 5

Line 4

Line 6

Line 5

Line 7

Line 6

Line 8

Line 7

Line 3

Line 8

Line 1

And here’s one of the quiet powers of the form: you can work with it as a kind of inquiry, even by taking a familiar text and allowing the order to shift. I experimented with the first verse of “America” — our original, unofficial national anthem —curious to see what might reveal itself when the lines follow this poetic form.

America
My country ‘tis of thee
Sweet land of Liberty
Of thee I sing

My country ‘tis of thee
Land where my fathers died
Of thee I sing
Land of the Pilgrim’s pride

Land where my fathers died
From every mountain side
Land of the Pilgrim’s pride
Let Freedom ring

From every mountain side
Sweet land of Liberty
Let Freedom ring
America

What changes is subtle, but meaningful.

“Sweet land of Liberty” follows “From every mountain side.” That untethers it from the certainty of possession, and Liberty circles back into landscape rather than slogan.

“Land where my fathers died” quietly cycles into prominence, bringing inheritance, sacrifice, and unspoken cost forward in the pattern.

And “America” becomes both invocation and echo — less declaration than reverberation.

Reordering the lines destabilizes the patriotic assurance of the original hymn without altering a single word. Meaning shifts simply by where we place our attention, and what we allow to return.

Whether you’re moved to write something entirely new, or to re-listen to an inherited text with fresh ears, I hope you’ll experiment and share what you discover in the comments. At Releasing Memory, creativity is one of our antidotes to fear and despair.

Let’s keep making together.

Creating is how I stay grounded, clear-headed, and hopeful. In times of upheaval—political, cultural, personal—writing becomes more than expression; it becomes a practice and an anchor.

Today, I’m sharing a reflection written about my work by author and screenwriter Blake Kimzey, founder of Writing Workshops. His piece traces a creative turning point: my shift from writing YA science fiction toward a hybrid creative nonfiction practice—ancestor memoir, poetry, and performance—that lives, in part, on Substack, as Releasing Memory.

That transition didn’t happen all at once. It was shaped through sustained craft, community, and risk—through classes, workshops, and a Paris retreat that helped me listen more closely to the stories asking to be told.

Blake’s reflection on my writing journey—reposted here with permission—captures how sustained creative practice can become a form of transformation.

What follows is Blake’s story based on that conversation, “From YA Novelist to Pushcart Prize Nominated Poet: Robin Stevens Payes’s Transformative Journey.”

These words from Robin Stevens Payes capture the heart of a remarkable creative transformation. A seasoned YA science fiction author with an established readership among Gen Z teens, Robin arrived at WritingWorkshops.com ready to excavate something deeply personal—her grandmother’s untold story of fleeing Ukraine’s Pale of Settlement. What unfolded was nothing short of a creative metamorphosis, culminating in a Pushcart Prize-nominated poem published in New Verse News.

A Writer Ready for Something New

Robin came to WritingWorkshops.com as the accomplished author of the Edge of Yesterday YA time-travel adventure series, complete with an interactive learning platform and a devoted following of young adult readers. But something was stirring beneath the surface—a multigenerational story of trauma, resilience, and silenced women’s voices that demanded to be told in an entirely new way.

Building the Foundation

Robin’s journey with us began with Family Stories with Eraldo Souza dos Santos, a course that provided the introduction, tools, structure, practices, and confidence she needed to dive into her ancestor memoir project.

The results were immediate and dramatic—Robin went from zero to 10,000 words in just four weeks. “Eraldo is a gifted writer and fabulous teacher. He was quite generous with us.”

The momentum continued with a follow-up course, Writing And/As/About Resistance, also with Eraldo. This class allowed Robin to place her emerging pieces within the context of resistance literature, deepening her understanding of how personal stories can speak to universal truths about speaking out and seeking justice.

Robin also participated in Playing with Time with Amber Sparks, a one-day seminar that took her wide and deep into the traditions of science fiction storytelling and time travel—skills that would prove invaluable for a writer already versed in temporal narratives through her YA work.

Paris: Where Everything Crystallized

The pivotal moment came during the Creative Nonfiction Workshop in Paris with literary agent Mark Owen Gottlieb. In that inspiring setting, Mark helped Robin see where her story was beginning to take shape—and where there were holes that needed attention. Fellow participants in the Paris cohort echoed these insights in nuanced ways, providing the kind of constructive feedback that only comes from creating in community.

Mark impressed upon the group the importance of building an author platform and cultivating community. For Robin, whose previous platform centered on Gen Z readers, this meant creating something entirely new. Acting on Mark’s advice, she launched Releasing Memory on Substack—a space for long-form stories and poetry that would help her find her tribe among like-minded creatives exploring similar themes.

A Pushcart Prize Nomination

The culmination of this creative evolution is “Women’s History 2025: SAY HER NAME,” a poem published in New Verse News that has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. The piece emerged directly from the creative nonfiction project Robin developed in preparation for Paris—a testament to how workshop experiences can catalyze work that resonates far beyond the classroom.

Robin describes her transformation with characteristic honesty: “Before taking the workshop, my writing life was focused almost solely on YA fiction writing, but now it’s morphed into creating this wild creative nonfiction/poetry/solo performance hybrid. The project is expansive, exciting and scary, pushing the boundaries.”

Wisdom for Fellow Writers

When asked about her secret for pushing through when writing gets difficult, Robin draws on her background as a science writer who once interviewed the neuroscientist who discovered the brain’s default mode network.

Her advice? Step away. Take a shower. Go for a walk. Let your mind wander.

“Figuring out what comes next, or how to resolve a plot dilemma almost never resulted from pushing. It emerged when I let my focus diffuse and my gaze dim.”

For those on the fence about taking a workshop, Robin offers this encouragement: “At worst, you will have a chance to learn or create something new. At best, the experience will launch (or relaunch) you along your writing path. If your experience is anything like mine, you will be glad you did.”

What’s Next

Robin continues to publish weekly on Substack and is currently enrolled in an upcoming prose poem intensive with John Sibley Williams, further refining the hybrid form her work has become. Her mantra for 2026 captures the spirit that has carried her this far: “Create, create, create!”

What keeps Robin up at night—in the best way—is her multigenerational project [Re]member the World, which she describes as an act of Tikkun Olam—repairing the world by bringing the stories of generations of Jewish women to life. It’s a project about resisting shame and silencing, finding one’s voice, and healing through storytelling.

Themes that are only growing louder, more relevant.

Blake Kimzey is the Founder & Executive Director of WritingWorkshops. His work has been adapted for broadcast on NPR and published by Tin House, McSweeney’s, Short Fiction, Longform, VICE, and over 70 other literary journals. His screenplay with Kyle Minor, a dramatic WWII movie about the war-time actions of Polish underground hero Jan Karski, is set for production in 2026.

In Releasing Memory, I share essays, poetry, and works-in-progress that honor ancestral story, lived experience, and the future we imagine together. Grateful for longtime readers.

New here? Join for free to read and engage—or support with a paid subscription to help memory take deeper root.

As 2025 draws to a close, I find myself tapping into two streams at once, wondering which might offer perspective—or whether dissonance itself is the point.

In one, physicists remind us how little of the universe we touch. Most of reality is dark, unmeasured, indifferent to our dramas. We are not even a blip in that vastness.

Following this stream, Rumi’s words come to mind: “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

A paradox that refuses to resolve—unseen, and yet carrying infinitudes.

In the other stream, I am inside our very human story. War. Greed. Fear. Silencing. Bodies broken by history. And also love. Courage. Joy. The imagination that keeps reaching for repair.

As James Baldwin wrote of this more Earth-bound paradox, “Life is tragic, and therefore unutterably beautiful.”

In my lived experience, both streams run in parallel, cross, diverge, rush and meander—each eventually finding its way to the sea. From a human perspective, how can I follow both?

I pause. I attune. I wonder: what is essential?
Inspiration is a whisper between breaths.

2025 feels like a year that exposes what has been hidden. Material destruction made visible. Old narratives fraying. A moment that asks whether we will keep reenacting what we know, or risk imagining something else.

In Jewish mysticism, creation begins with Tzimtzum—a contraction that makes room. Light shatters. Sparks scatter. What follows is not conquest, but care: gathering what has been broken, restoring relationship. Tikkun.

I have always thought of those sparks as souls. Not isolated. Not complete on their own. Each one carrying a fragment of what wants to come into being.

I pause. I attune. I wonder: what is essential? 
Inspiration is a whisper between breaths.

So I sit with the question: what does this brief, particular life—this drop that holds oceans—offer now?

And my heart whispers back.

Attention.
Story.
Presence.

This is not what I expect to hear. It says nothing declarative. Not a call-to-action; more like a call to attune to new harmonies. A way of overwintering—after the seeds are planted, when the earth settles into stillness.

A reminder that seeding a new unknown requires faith that, after the pause, spring will return, and with it, new life.

This is not the same as inaction. In this quiet calling, seeding the future invites us to tend continuity in a time of rupture. To listen for the quiet instructions beneath the noise. To trust that even small acts of meaning participate in a larger repair.

I pause. I attune. I wonder: what is essential? 
Inspiration is a whisper between breaths.

As the year turns, I wish us all presence. The presence to listen. To look for small shoots that signal something new emerging—something new that we are bringing forth together.

New ways. New hope.

Each of us an ocean in a drop—a drop in an ocean. What power we contain!

In 2026, may we bear witness to that which is emerging. With attention and intention, may we all contribute in this call to renewal. To a better future.

And to that, I say, L’chaim!

A year ago, these words were cast into the current. Read them again now. What holds? What has eroded? What new channel is forming?

Chanukah comes in the year’s dimmest days, when the sun lingers low and our ancestors once feared the light might not return. The holiday remembers a small band who reclaimed their temple against all odds, and a single flask of oil meant for one night that burned for eight—long enough for hope to take root again.

The chanukiah, with its eight rising lights and the shamash that kindles them, carries that memory forward: a reminder that in the deepest dark, even one spark can open a path. Chanukah is a transmission across generations—an invitation to tend the flame, to gather warmth, to welcome joy back into the world, night after night.

The Festival of Lights arrives at a dream-threshold on the calendar—the longest nights of the year—when memory loosens its hold on linear time. In this season, images surface unbidden: fragments of earlier winters, voices of loved ones who have passed, color and shadow braided together.

This year, the holiday also coincides with the 22nd anniversary of the death of my father, David Stevens, his yahrzeit. We light a special candle in his memory.

This Chanukah prayer emerged from an early morning dream.

Wishing you all the joys of the season.

A Chanukah Present

branching flames

eight arms rise into an arc
a ninth lifts the dark
spark after spark after spark
spark after spark after spark

in the hour before dawn
shadows still drawn
day streaks wan
lift the dark

branching into dreamlight

a warmth-not-summer
opens beneath my feet
a child waits
in a place
that might be home
—or mercy

one candle, shamash shimmering
flame flickering

must find him. I drive a road
too thin for dawn of day
highway soaring towards sky
dawn unspooling
into a wild blue yonder
the color of remembering
what we forgot

kindling the flame right to left
the whispering prayer
vaporizes between breaths

i almost miss the fork, hard-left before the river
where the skyway descends before the bridge

submerges, a rising serpentine wall
holds back the onrush of waters. brings me back—
something in me has turned here before

two candles, shamash shimmering
flame quickening

an ancestor-phone
glows in my hand,
buttons dull as worn bone.
i call forward
and reach a voice
that has not yet been born
or has long since left

branching memories

the city appears
as ruin—
signs dissolving
into rust, familiar
storefronts melting
in shadow, memories
that carried our mothers through

rain and good fortune rip the tapestry.
water pours through my eyes
blessings once forgotten,
now return

three candles, shamash wavering
flame quivering

from that tear appears
a figure shimmery-
solid as the name
i no longer dream to speak
until he stands before me.

sparking joy

four candles, shamash wavering
flame sparking

daddy!
(a shining ephemera
before the stars dim)

catching light

his arms—
bright threads
from the underside
of the weave—
wrap around me,
pulling me and time
in close.

five candles, shamash wavering
flame flickering

i say:
we’re late—
the boy—
but the boy
steps out from behind my father,
already here,
already whole,
light pooling at his feet.

six candles, shamash wavering
flame flickering

hineini!

grins my son holding the hand of
his poppop, never lost, now found
a miracle enfolded, time

catching fire

seven candles, shamash guiding
flame flickering

before night’s visions dim,
fading into darkness
I wake
holding treasures
like a tiny flask of oil delivering
an eternity of light

what miracle is this!

a sacred spark enduring
through the long night
the dark path to ignite

eight candles, shamash guarding
flame burning bright

spark after spark after spark
spark after spark after spark

gifts of light and time

a grandfather’s dream delivery
a Chanukah
present.

In every generation, the miracle of light takes on new meaning.

In 2020, during the pandemic, we brought our Chanukah celebration outdoors to gather safely as a family. We formed a living chanukiah—each of us carrying candles, their flames multiplying—circling an “eternal” fire at the center. The branches were human. The light was shared.

Tradition held, even as it changed. A new memory releasing.

נס גדול היה פה. (Nes Gadol Haya Po). A great miracle happened here.

Complement “A Chanukah Present” by unboxing your hidden powers: Ancient tools. Ways of knowing. The very human gift of memory.