A CLEARING is an intentional space to slow down and make art outside the crashing waves of dominant culture.

As a practice, 

✿ we invite artists, writers, musicians, dancers, etc. to take part in A POSSIBLE PRACTICE: year-long creative cycles in conversation with a single poem, making work inspired by the poem’s themes.

✿ we share readings, playlists, and interviews that grow our understanding of this practice.

✿ we host collaborative community happenings across Maine in nontraditional art spaces.

✿ we create books, zines, and visual poems—surviving catalogs of the community we are growing together.

A CLEARING is co-founded and co-directed by Alana Dao and meg willing. Residing in different parts of Maine, we meet every week over FaceTime to create, plan, and make books. We marvel at our featured artists who engage with our themes in ways that surprise and move us. We create alongside them. There’s a beautiful uncertainty in collaboration, and A CLEARING is a shapeshifter in that uncertainty—recalibrating itself with each new artist, event, and cycle. It refuses to be static. It asks questions with slow answers. And we swim along, together, in those changing currents.

  • Co-Founder / Co-Director

    meg willing (she/her) is a poet, artist, editor, and book designer based in Farmington, Maine. Born in Oregon and raised in South America, Asia, and Maine, her creative work explores fragmented memory through the integration of text and image. The former Managing Editor of Alice James Books, she currently serves as Art and Design Editor for Gigantic Sequins; Shop Assistant at Independent Auto Volvo Service; Assistant Manager at Devaney, Doak, & Garrett Booksellers; and Co-Director of A CLEARING.

  • Co-Founder / Co-Director

    Alana Dao (she/her) is a mother, writer, and restaurant worker based in Portland, Maine. Born in Texas and raised in Asia and the US, her writing and artistic practice navigates the complicated relationships between food and contemporary culture related to race, gender, and socio-economic class. Her previous writing has been featured in The Chart, VICE, and the Huffington Post. She received a BA from Smith College and a MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.