These are some pages from my project/freewrite/workshop notebook. Not counting my daily journals, I am rather unorganized in my notebook-keeping (this one’s first entry is from June 21, 2017), but I’ve been making an effort to keep track of my project notes and idea composting more regularly.

This first page is from an editing session I did by Zoom with Angel Nafis. It was six months after losing my dad and I was trying to reorient my poetic mind. She workshopped two Persephone poems that I had been (and am still) trying to revise to publication-ready for years. We talked about grief, the anger we feel when people older than us still have both of their parents (“or their GRANDPARENTS!” she said.)

Balance what is known with what needs to be known

When you recognize structure, you prioritize

In August 2025, I did a two week writing residency at Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Taking inspiration from a few other writers, I kept a log of my days, recording how I spent my time, the people I met, and the flotsam in my subconscious that appeared when given the spaciousness of unstructured time. I have learned that residencies will bring up lots of gnarly anxieties and insecurities. Beth Pickens says that at a residency, “you’re confronted with your mind.” No matter how idyllic the setting, there’s always at least one day (or one hour each day!) where you feel like your writing is shit, your project directionless, and then all the doubtful voices of your adolescent self awaken and you find yourself moping around a trail until dinner restores you. Or there’s an unavoidable clash of personalities between you and another resident.

The redacted name from this entry was another resident who was bizarrely cold toward me. It happens! Luckily, there were always 20+ other people at the residency at a time. The books mentioned in these pages are The Essential June Jordan and The Land is Holy by noam keim.

In January of this year, I enrolled in Shira Erlichman’s month-long virtual poetry workshop called In Surreal Life, which involved weekly poetry workshops with an assigned cohort of 4 other people, visiting writer calls, and daily prompts. For both new and seasoned poets who miss a workshop setting, I highly recommend this course. I signed up for an additional one-on-one with Shira to go over one unpublished poem. Shira happens to be Angel Nafis’s wife and partner of 15 years, so I’ve now been lucky enough to be workshopped by both halves of a Poetry Power Couple. Shira introduced me to some revising practices and questions to ask of the poem to help it become what it is.

Going deeper into the mess

Dancing vs. walking matters

“The structure of a poem has information about how we feel about bodies.”

At Sewanee, my daily log included notes from workshop, classes, readings, and craft lectures. The special topics class I took with Felicia Zamora raked in six pages of notes, often written too fast to comprehend.

The Archive vs. archive. Capital R Risk vs lower case r risk. The body as pedagogy. “Mining the fond.” “What are your thresholds?”

“Fuck legibility. Legible to whom?”

“Our obsessions find their way to the page whether we want them to or not. Let them.”

What are you revealing in your work

vs

What are you withholding