One of the most life-changing things my therapist ever taught me is to stop responding to emotional subtext from others. You are not obligated to meet needs and feelings that others refuse to acknowledge even exist on their end. Others have to use their words to get their needs met.

Can't believe I've had this massive sage plant for three years and just now thought to try brewing it. This tea is delightful.

"we need to focus on kitchen-table issues" hey wtf are you talking about at your kitchen table, if not the military being deployed to your cities and your family members being kidnapped by ICE and the genocide in Gaza going on two years and states maneuvering to make elections less democratic and

Rewatching season 2 of The Bear and it's really making me crave having a partner and creative pursuit that I'm neck deep in.

It's not a career. It's not a calling. It's a terminal hobby. You will die doing this. Become a writer.

It's bourbon and peach slices for me tonight as I fact check a couple lines in a poem I might submit.

Lavender dressing might be my favorite discovery of the summer. // Other small joys: fruit and herb salads, a surprisingly pleasant black bean dip with fresh oregano, finally figuring out how to make decent quinoa, watching the watermelon grow.

Been spending the summer working through various backlogs and honestly—once you can tell that you're making real progress—it's not a bad way to spend a summer.

Looking through a pile of old poem-a-day drafts, I think maybe I've been slowly writing something along the lines of Apocalypse at Tinker Creek: suburban pastoral shot through with foreboding. All snow and trees and deer, and a wordless dread that I swallow rather than speak.

Place your ladder on a firm, flat surface and always have a spotter!

Further things that have made this week survivable: The most deeply green basil I have ever grown. Abundant oregano and mint. Watching a fawn have the zoomies in my backyard, heat be damned.

Grateful for the @ofpoetrypodcast.bsky.social back catalog today for introducing me to Tom Snarsky and Carla Sofia Ferreira, and for reminding me to be a writer again after too much time away from that version of myself.

new little post up on the personal site™️ about how there can and should be joy in alt text :) bryn.codes/writing/the-...

inside you there are two sewers.

Sunlight makes a tremendous difference. (This is not metaphorical, but straightforwardly about the weather.)

Cold, overcast string of winter days, a week's worth of unmelted snow on the ground, and I'm homesick but not for a place.

There's no pleasure quite like spending a snowy Sunday morning writing up notes on the book you finished reading yesterday. Espresso and a fluffy sweater and the sure knowledge that this doesn't matter to anyone but you. Ice on all the little tree branches. Sky the color of fog.

Recently I've noticed some people saying "needs ___ed" instead of "needs ___ing" or "needs to be ___ed." Like they are using a past participle in place of a gerund. This is a new thing, right? Or am I just losing it? I don't remember ever hearing this before ~2020. #linguistics #langsky #editing

Of course you don't know how to write it. That's why you have to write it

I cannot, during these horrific times, recommend enough the importance of making pockets of time to just do things that are not related to anything but the joy of being alive and playing. You need it. You do. It will keep you whole. Which we need. We need you whole.

What a lovely day to remember that The Shins exist. // Snow starting to fall, a big pot of lentil soup on the stove, a glass of wine, and a game of Catan coming up at 4pm.

I like poems that are like old homes, with a simple brick exterior, an economical interior, but in the walls there are thousands of horse hairs being used for insulation, between the stanzas there is the sense of hundreds of creatures galloping, and there at the center is a fire, an image burning

people say “you need to start living in the real world” but they forget that the real world includes lupines and lightning bugs and ginger beer and starlight and sea coasts and Renoir paintings and Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and fog banks and foxes playing in snow.

“Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action… Our largest problems won’t be solved by heroes. They’ll be solved, if they are, by movements, coalitions, civil society.”

as a writer, it's amazing how deep and intimate my relationship with language is—and yet how difficult i find it to say things to, uh, people, anywhere

Finally read that Esquire article that's been going around. Not sure just what I want to say about it at the moment. Maybe nothing at all. At least not here. Privacy and dignity are so fundamental, and so expensive.

Is it only writing when we have a pen in hand, or a nearby keyboard? I think writing includes much more than that: patience, attention, openness to the world past screen or page—to what's findable there. —Carl Phillips, from "Silence"

One thing I'd love to see discussed more is how deportation affects families. TONS of undocumented people have US-citizen kids who've never lived anywhere else. What happens to them?

I go back and forth about using the 📌 feed to bookmark things. It's handy, but I feel weird clogging up people's posts and notifications with content-less comments.

Today in relatable science: Gulls making a mysterious daily trip that turned out to be to a potato chip factory

the map is the territory, I think someone said that once

This turns into such an interesting thread about borrowing ancient alphabets (and, later, mechanical typesetting systems) across languages.

This is still my advice: Become a writer anyway. Fuck it, do it, it won't save you, but it's still a beautiful dream to write novels and short stories and poems and mingle with other dreamers and make art and laugh in the face of death. And writing is constant death. Live más.

Smells Christmassy outside...

Is it bad that this seems too obvious to be a final question, so I started doubting myself?

And we're here for a kind vibe, not a toxic vibe! If someone's a jerk, block, don't quote-skeet to dunk on them. Starve bullies of attention. If someone tells you you've harmed them, take the correction & don't tone police. If something's not for you, unfollow and go elsewhere. Be a mensch.

We're Taco Bell Quarterly and we're ready to fight. We're more prestigious than the Dandy and the Paris Review, who we are violently choking on our latest cover. Our acceptance rate is less than 1%. Check out Poem in the Shape of the Poet Beating Henry Kissinger to Death with Their Bare Hands

Yep, and that's the sting of it. But there's something to be said for this kind of clarity.

Generally we think of alt-text as the domain of those with accessibility needs. However alt-text is useful for many reasons, which benefit your viewers, as well as you, the creator!

The tinderbox anxiety of living on wooded property in a drought in the fall as the dry leaves pile up in the woods around us and wildfires flare up in neighboring towns, with the election four days away and a work crew taking down seven dying trees near the house. Rattling, inside and out.

Relieved that someone else is doing most of the talking, but slightly apprehensive about getting hit in the face with a stray piece of shrimp?

towus grapefruits, painted by amanda almira newton, 1908

Really appreciate this essay on how context and flow/friction can shape our attention, thinking, and writing. (And I've long admired the structure, thoughtfulness, and longevity of Mandy's site generally.)

Enjambment napkin doodle, I love it.

Ok then! Appletober No. 1 @brookejarvis.bsky.social’s absolute banger in California Sunday from 2019 which I have reread at least six times since it came out: story.californiasunday.com/cosmic-crisp...

I'm a little tipsy because it's cider season along the NY/NJ state line BUT... if writing is an extension or manifestation or WAY of thinking, the "shitty first draft" framing does not serve us because why pursue shitty thinking? I'm 100% here for awkward, earnest, rough-edged first drafts though!

Send poems to your friends / write poems / share your poems / read poems because poems are also a lifeline

This is Bluesky, not Muskiverse. We’re over here living our one wild and precious life. Which is too short for hatefollowing, for dunking, for clout-chasing, for weird sanctimonious games. Be a person /zayin a mensch and go about your business, nu. Read, amplify, communicate.