Thunder Ceases
Dear friends,
1. Thunder ceases
I aim to send seasonal updates — four emails a year — but this year I’m running with the notion that spring, summer, autumn, and winter are a specifically European construction of nature, that there are other valid ways to understand time, and that now, as the seasons warp, those ways have something to teach us.
The four seasons are based on agricultural rhythms of sowing and harvesting — what Cicero called second nature, or nature worked by agriculture. But as Ferris Jabr writes, “Ancient Egyptians recognized three main seasons corresponding to the rhythms of the Nile River: Akhet, the season of inundation; Peret, the season of emergence…; and Shemu, the season of harvest in low water. In ancient Japan, the year was divided into 24 stages that were further split into 72 microseasons lasting a few days each, with evocative names such as ‘mist starts to linger,’ ‘wild geese fly north,’ … and ‘deer shed antlers.’” Right now, we are in Kaminari sunawachi koe o osamu, Thunder ceases season. A clearing, a quantum of quiet between storms.
2. A decade-long orbit
In the polar regions, where my mind has lately been, two main seasons exist: summer, when the sun never sets, and winter, when the sun never rises.
I’ve been thinking about the far north as I wrap up final details for my new poetry book, Memory of a Larger Mind. The book was written in collaboration with glaciers, by which I mean I was often sitting on or very near a glacier as I wrote these poems. I visited dying glaciers in the Arctic, Alaska, and throughout the Pacific Northwest. The resulting poems are elegies and love songs, celebrations and laments, illuminated by shifts of light, wind, sound, and scent. As our world moves from ice to water, these poems move, too: cycling from grief to love to joy and back again, asking how to withstand and how to transform. This book has been a long time coming, and I’m very proud of it. I hope it finds its way to you.
Memory of a Larger Mind will be in bookstores in mid-November and is now available for pre-order. Pre-ordering is one of the most helpful things you can do to support my work: it signals to booksellers and reviewers that the book has an interested audience, which has exponential effects.
You can read excerpts in Poetry Northwest, Otiyot, and Blood Orange Review. And if you’re in Portland, please mark your calendar for Friday, December 4, at Powell’s City of Books, where I’ll launch the book in conversation with Julia Rosen, a science journalist who wrote about my New Earth series of paintings for the Los Angeles Times in 2020. This book really began when the New Earth series began, in late 2016, so our conversation will complete a decade-long orbit: an end which is also a beginning.
3. Skein
I’ve used the word many times. I love the way the hard K sends the vowels soaring, then the N lassos them back, tucking them into the word: a neat loop. But I’d never actually made a skein until recently. Now I’ve made many, and I’ve completed my first two weavings, part of a site-specific installation at PLAYA.
This work is part of a yearlong fellowship at PLAYA focused on how water and wildfire are changing the region’s ecology and culture. As part of a group of nine artists, I heard from farmers, ranchers, scientists, foresters, teenagers, children... a wide range of voices that we then tried to incorporate into our art. I focused on Ana Springs, a groundwater-fed spring system at the north end of the Summer Lake basin. The springs feed the Ana River, which feeds Summer Lake and its wetlands, essential habitat for the millions of birds that migrate along the Pacific Flyway. As the climate warms and industrial agriculture draws down the aquifer, the springs are draining fast.
The installation includes a Palette of Place: 44 pigments made from rocks, plants, and bones foraged from the bioregion, a work that’s been in process since 2019, and was made in collaboration with many others. A painting, Fire, rock, water / Water, rock, sky 1, is made of translucent silk painted with those pigments. It hangs alongside a weaving, Fire, rock, water / Water, rock, sky 2, made of linen, silk, silk moth cocoons, and ancestral lace dyed with flowers, rocks, and bones foraged from the Ana Springs watershed. Both are installed so that the land and waters of which they’re made are visible through them. Foreground and background flicker; perception flexes, making space for new feelings and ideas.
There are also 18 Neshome likht (Soul light) candles. I made the candles by adapting the Ashkenazi mourning practice of feldmestn, in which women measured graves or cemeteries with thread that then became candlewick. Here, I measured the waters and birds of the Summer Lake basin. The candles rest on another weaving, Open vessel, an open weave made of linen with plants, bones, and feathers from the Ana Springs watershed woven into it each morning.
And there is an artist’s book, The Measure of Ana Springs, in a limited edition of 54 copies, an elegy for a spring that is also an ode to water, birds, and color. It holds an essay, a sequence of poems, and images of the place and the making of the work. I think it's one of the most simultaneously expressive and pointed things I've ever made. It brings my writing and my visual art into one object, which I rarely do, to call attention to a specific water body in a specific biome. It grew from interviews, research, and sustained time in a place that has been transformative for me and critical to my art. If you’d like a copy, please be in touch.
Books are available on a sliding scale of $12–36. Printing costs $18 a copy; everything above that goes to three organizations working for water and life in this region: WaterWatch of Oregon, which defends the groundwater feeding Ana Springs and Summer Lake; the Ambo Fund, directed by the Klamath Tribes for their sacred fish and tribal water rights; and the Lake County Umbrella Watershed Council, which restores watersheds across Lake County.
The Measure of Ana Springs and Memory of a Larger Mind are both part of an ongoing project on place-based memory, also titled Memory of a Larger Mind. In it, I explore the histories and futures of “sacrifice zones”: clear cuts, incarceration and concentration camps, glaciers. I travel to these places, writing and gathering flowers, rocks, water, and bones. In my studio, I transform these foraged materials into pigments for my art and memories for my writing. The resulting art and poetry are ways toward change, containers in which grief might shift to love and difficult pasts might move toward more peaceful futures. A new website for the project is in progress, and it will be the subject of a solo exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum next fall (details below).
4. Summer highlights
5. Events + Updates
September:
The One Who Dwells in This House, Jerusalem Biennale ᐧ September 24 – November 12, 2026 ᐧ Jerusalem
Wildfire + Water: Artists and Scientists Adapting to Change ᐧ 1-day pop up exhibition ᐧ Saturday, September 26, 2026 ᐧ PLAYA, Summer Lake, Oregon
October:
Every Force Evolves a Form, poetry workshop with Art/Lab: Innovating Jewish Arts & Culture. Register here ᐧ Sunday, October 25, 3pm - 5pm ᐧ Portland, OR
Head for the Hills Poetry Reading, with Claudia Saleeby Savage ᐧ Wednesday, October 28, 6 – 7:30 pm ᐧ Multnomah County Library (Northwest), 2030 NW Pettygrove St, Portland, OR
November:
Studio 7 Poetry Series, with Donna Henderson and Brittney Corrigan ᐧ Sunday, November 15, 1 pm ᐧ Studio 7, 87230 Central Road, Eugene, OR
December:
Memory of a Larger Mind, reading and book launch at Powell’s City of Books, in conversation with science journalist Julia Rosen ᐧ Friday, December 4, 7 pm ᐧ 1005 W Burnside St, Portland, OR
Upcoming:
After: Poems in Conversation ᐧ Poetry workshop with Literary Arts ᐧ details to come ᐧ January 23-24 and January 30-31, 2027 ᐧ Portland, OR
Bainbridge Island Third Thursday Poetry Reading ᐧ Thursday, February 18, 2027 ᐧ Bainbridge Island, WA
Turning: A reading and conversation with Carolina Ebeid, Julie Carr, Ava Aviva Avnisan, and Nabil Echchaibi ᐧ details to come ᐧ Thursday, March 11, 2027 ᐧ University of Colorado Boulder ᐧ Boulder, CO
Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, reading and workshop, details to come ᐧ Sunday, April 4, 2027 ᐧ Los Angeles CA
Pigment + Place 2027, workshop at PLAYA ᐧ details to come ᐧ May 27 - June 6, 2027 ᐧ Summer Lake, OR
Terrain Land Arts Exhibition, Leach Botanical Garden ᐧ details to come ᐧ May – November 2027 ᐧ Portland, OR
Memory of a Larger Mind ᐧ solo exhibition ᐧ Oregon Jewish Museum ᐧ September 26, 2027 – January 16, 2028 ᐧ Portland, OR
Recently published about my work:
My work was featured in “On Climate Grief” by Lindsay Costello, part of the Portland Mercury 2026 Climate Issue: “I think a lot of climate denialism is actually a form of grief,” Molnar explained. “It’s not wanting to engage with a reality that we can all feel in our bodies… There’s also a receptivity we’ve forgotten. There’s a sense of being held—reciprocal love that’s available.”
Here is a recording of my keynote presentation, “The Act of Enlivening” from the Tulsa Lit Fest. I shared the keynote with the wonderful poet Ken Hada. My talk weaves together the Tulsa Race Massacre, the water crisis of Ana Springs, pigment work, and the role of poets in a time of struggle.
I was honored to be a part of artist Cara Levine’s brilliant solo exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum, “Without End: Recent Work on Grief.” Cara organized a rich seven-day sequence of community events. I taught a workshop on writing poetry as a way to approach climate grief.
I’ll have an essay included in the forthcoming anthology Again at a Crossroads: New Jewish Thought for a Better World, to be published by Ben Yehudah press in 2027. The book has nearly reached its funding goals. If you're inclined to support it, the link is above. Thank you.
My friend Anne Germanacos recently sent me a 2014 interview she gave. In it, she says “I'm not sure whether a book can be said to exist without a reader. I'm so grateful to the people who've engaged deeply with my words, giving them life.” Exactly. Thank you for reading, for giving my work life.
Steady onward,
Daniela
