Dear Friends,

Last night I dreamed about a tiny sofa in a bookshelf-lined hallway, baking a chocolate cake for movie night, and teaching a weaving class about sports.

When I woke up, I read from the book by my bed. On the cover is the view from the top of a spiral staircase.

Out the window, eight guys are working with hammers on a pitched roof. They’re listening to a song by Troy y Los Reyes.

Hold on, the oatmeal is boiling over—

Early June, Stevie brought me along to a quiet residency in Michigan. We talked divination, let the spirits in and out, and metabolized our grief in this icy overgrown house. I wrote poems and embroidered new words from them. What does embracture mean to you?

I’m wondering about the labor of letters. Writing is free; how do you prove the value of a phrase? Maybe by making the letters take up time (stitching) and material (thread).

Or maybe by making the letters into string and weaving them together in patterns, like the projections at Noa’s book launch. Traversing the plane of almost-meaning and piecing together the clues feels “manual,” like learning to read anew.

The font pictured is a monospaced mod of Nat Pyper’s love letter to Third World Gay Revolution. What about adding ballast to the letterforms, to make them sink in? Taking a page from Laurel Schwulst’s Times Dot, the website of the 41st Midwest Sacred Harp Convention is stamped with big shape note shapes on every i and j.

These are ways of paying a little more attention to letters. I’m trying to mediate on them, to let them simmer, reveal another layer, to make sure I really understand them. Following the arrow from “what this means” to “I mean it.”

That’s all I can say for now, I have to go. But let’s talk more soon. In the meantime, what have you been up to?

yours,
Rosemary
https://rosie.rest/

Special thanks to Fran for building the world’s most beautiful chair for the sail loft.