About My Creative Work
I move between genres: poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. I’ve included excerpts from each below. When my children were young, poetry was the form I could sustain and felt most drawn to. Now that they’re a little older, my poems have gotten shorter and my fiction has grown longer. I’m currently working on a YA novel and a memoir in poetry about the bodies of water where I grew up.
After visiting a new theater space in Los Angeles, I’ve also been thinking about how Bodies of Water might take shape as a one-act play or live installation. These projects reflect an ongoing creative practice shaped by family, place, and story.
(from a nonfiction collection of marine and animal essays)
Something was moving in the water, possibly a plastic bag or a chunk of surfboard the size of an oval serving platter. I stopped looking for green shore crabs and watched what might have been a bag or even a flattened milk jug lolling just past where the little waves crash open and run up on the rocks. Then a fin, about the size of a large human foot, came flopping out, barely breaking the surface. So not a grocery bag, but something alive.
For several minutes the fish rolled back and forth, flashing a fin here and there but floating sideways most of the time. One of the guides at the kayak dock said it was a mola mola. He said people mistake them for sharks because of those grayish-white fins and sides.
I didn’t think it looked like a shark, I thought it was some kind of disoriented flounder. But flounder (or fluke) are Atlantic seaboard fish that look and act like little sandy bathroom carpets. Fluke don’t cavort on the surface and if you manage to catch one and pull it up, it’s like catching half a ream of very active paper.
I didn’t much like the looks of fluke when I was a girl, not until it came on a plate coated in bread crumbs, with tartar sauce on the side. Young flounder start out like most fish in terms of eyeball location, but as they grow up and their bodies flatten, the bottom side’s yellow eye moves close to the topside eyeball and the whole fish just looks a little off.
Like all children who have crabbed with a chicken neck on the end of a string, I like to think I know something about marine life, which is why I went to take a better look at the fish that looked like a flattened milk jug just off Catalina Island.
The mola mola looks like an old shark that another shark accidentally bit in half. Miraculously the bitten half survived and now it’s swim-flopping around without its tail. I understood why if you had never seen a shark before, you might think it was a shark. Part of a shark, anyway. Its mouth looked nothing like an actual shark’s mouth either. It was a little dark circle as if the shark said, “oh,” as in, “oh dear, where is my tail?”
What I didn’t know is that these fish can grow very large and can live for many years in coastal and deeper waters. I assumed larger meant larger than an oval platter, but larger for the mola mola can mean the size of a white rhino. A few days later when we took the ferry back from Catalina I saw two more of these fish at different times, probably five miles apart. The water was very clear that day, the sun was out, and these two were both much larger and much thicker than the little serving platter rolling just off Pebbly Beach.
Seen from above it seemed like the fish, especially the second one, had an innate dignity I had completely overlooked, like some heavy, benign god of the water, something made of stardust and whale bone, shell and shark. Mola is Latin for mill wheel, hence the name of the fish, but it’s also been called the toppled wheel fish (its Chinese name translated) and in many languages it’s called the moon fish, which is a beautiful name for this whitish-gray gentle creature whose mouth makes it look a little surprised, and whose caudal fin, curled in around itself, makes it the right fish to rise up out of the ocean, through low-lying clouds and marine layer mist, higher and higher, rising to roll itself back and forth across the night sky.
(poem from The Vital Function of Constant Narrative published 2023)
Among the flatware, insects clattered, their legs dumb/ twigs bent back by knees. Weeks flew by with dishes/ dirtied, conquered. We gave hurrahs, made anxious/ toasts, here, here. The lights brought flittering bodies./ In the morning, on the porch, the dead made a carpet/ of dried bodies. In an animal world, I blamed my/ housekeeping and used two hands to hold your coffee./ You took the tepid, brown water from my cupped/ fingers and sugar ants made lines through the kitchen./ One night you mentioned means of deterring vermin:/ boric acid along the walls, chrysanthemum powder/ sifted under the sink, disks full of poison. We decided/ food stains grew night flowers and found cotton on the/ sliced cheese. I wonder how we brought ourselves/ back from disaster? Two sips of water and a squeeze/ of lemon? I don’t remember. When we sat to talk/ a fly landed in the butter. Sticky paper was zip to him,/ but in the dark it might have caught us. I lit the house/ bright as a torch, but that, you know, called every new/ and white moth. The little ants did not veer from their/ anointed path over the linoleum. Nor did you. It was/ time for bed when the crusts of toast bowed down/ offering hems of sticky jam. Outside in answer, the moon/ sank under the weight of a few soft carcasses.
(short story excerpt from a collection currently under consideration for publication)
I don’t have second sight and never did, but thirty years ago my husband and I bought a house in the business district with a stained glass window set in the front with red roses and the words, “Fortune Teller,” spelled out in milk-white letters. Back then we didn’t have the money to replace the glass so when people came to the door with questions and cash in hand, I didn’t turn them away. From the beginning my husband and I prayed for guidance on this because it’s in the book of Leviticus: ye shall not interpret omens or tell fortunes.
I tell each and every one of my customers that I can’t and won’t predict the future, but I can and will give good advice to the best of my abilities. If they don’t want advice we just sit with their troubles and pray for acceptance. Comfort is worth something in this world and if ever I am, or have been, a lowly vessel through which peace or salvation should flow, so be it. I offer what I can in good faith, go to church Sunday morning and Wednesday night, and my husband is a Saturday disciple. All that considered, we kept the big bay window and filed paperwork as an LLC. My husband says we are not to feel guilty about accepting money offered and I don’t.
There were some in our congregation who had an opinion about the window and my consulting business, and had to be shown, had to see for themselves, I was not a witch nor dabbling in the occult. Usually I could spot them a mile off and did my best to provide earthly insight into their troubles just like I do for all my customers. They sent their sisters and cousins—some of them still come back to see me on the regular and just ask that I not mention it to their aunt or whoever in the congregation sent them.
I don’t blame anyone for their preconceived notions, even our pastor was not comfortable with the words fortune teller, but I explained to him I have not and will not truck with false prophecy. It’s filed in our business plan, and printed on our business cards—we’re in the business of independent prayer support. To his credit, Father Pascal heard me on that and we agreed to disagree on the window’s lettering.
For thirty years I never had anything supernatural happen to me and I didn’t want anything to happen. Nobody needs bad spirits or judgement hanging over a home, meddling in our earthly lives. When it comes to protection, I believe in the power of prayer and keeping the good word close to my heart, as close as I can, like an insurance policy.
Two weeks ago everything changed.