from mine / to keep
A zine collaboration in conversation with
Solmaz Sharif’s poem “Vulnerability Study.”
Vulnerability Study
your face turning from mine
to keep from cumming
8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl
baba holding his pants
up at the checkpoint
a newlywed securing her updo
with grenade pins
a wall cleared of nails
for the ghosts to walk through
Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif is the author of Customs (Graywolf Press, 2022) and Look (Graywolf Press, 2016), a finalist for the National Book Award. She holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, the New York Times, and others. Her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lannan Foundation, and Stanford University. She is currently the Shirley Shenker Assistant Professor of English at U.C. Berkeley. Visit her website at solmazsharif.com.
Solmaz Sharif, “Vulnerability Study” from Look. Copyright © 2016 by Solmaz Sharif. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press, graywolfpress.org.
poem
We began this cycle of A POSSIBLE PRACTICE in May 2024 with Solmaz Sharif’s poem “Vulnerability Study” as our guide. Selecting this as our theme poem that spring was a simple knowing. We were drawn to the power of the distilled, of the succinct. The way Solmaz Sharif lays bare raw moments through direct imagery. The space allowed for us, the reader, to witness, to breathe between the stanzas; the space for “the ghosts to walk through”. In these lines, we felt the pulse of our specific yet universal humanity. The details, and our humanity in the details.
It was a tender revelation when we finally spoke aloud which blue bowls we envisioned in the second stanza. Alana’s sky blue bowl in her imagination: deep and lightly ridged like a shell, sitting at a table near a window , wet and dripping with sunlight and damp berries. meg’s grandfather’s cobalt blue cereal bowl, beaded with water in the dish drainer, his hands long gone for drying.
As we began to conceptualize A POSSIBLE PRACTICE: from mine / to keep, we talked about intimacy of form – of poetry as a whole and this poem specifically, but also of other forms and mediums that can hold and be held so closely. We reflected on our last cycle, SURRENDER MY SOFTNESS, engaged with Noor Hindi’s “Ode to Friendship” and the medium of mail art. We discussed continuance: what we wanted to shed and where we wanted to sink deeper. Our desire to pursue curiosity in moments that splinter us, the personal as political, language and all its (im)possibilities. To ask:
How can resolute attention shape our ethics, our art? How can specificity of language and image break the spells of oppressive structures? In what ways is vulnerability essential to our collective survival?
To keep the textures of the handmade and the privacies of the small object, we decided zines would be our medium: a self-contained, devotional aesthetic alive in the anti-capitalist undercurrents of community. We invited five artists to create alongside us. We expanded our practice further through a public open call for work considering our theme.
The completed zines were brought to us by way of delightful porch drop-offs and paper packages set outside a studio door, all with sweet notes accompanying them, mostly starting with “dear” and ending with <3. The zines would be distributed through the mail, one a month for six months, to those who signed up to receive them. Together one weekend, we curated which zine would arrive first, second, third… the sequence… and packed them in translucent envelopes, each cracking open a new skylight of understanding, of vulnerability in being seen. We became attentive to the care in our lives, and in this practice that sustains us.
On a warm September evening, we gathered at the Maine Women Writers Collection around a large wooden table. In the aura of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s nightgown, we soaked in the archive’s legacy: these artifacts, this place, and the people who tend to it. Their history of care extended to us. The tenderness of being together. We reflected on our near-decade collaboration and the generosity of those who have joined it. Nicole Manganelli and Raquel P Miller sat by our sides sharing what it was like to create their zines, stepping outside briefly to see what shadows Midori Morrow’s zine cast in the sun. The opportunity to connect in new ways — the first time, the first time in-person, the first time in a long time. With buoyed spirits, we soaked in the last bit of summer, preserving these slivers of hope for the long winter to come.
Over the cold months, we stayed in our slow, intentional pace. Outside the chaos offered clarity / the chaos offered chaos. We held both. We texted each other: I love you and am so glad to be on this planet doing things with you. We made reading lists, playlists. We made each other laugh. We pieced it together. Broke together, or talked about breaking together, or talked until we couldn’t help but break. We mended, and returned, and broke, and returned, and practiced breaking, and stayed.
This book, which has been imagined in countless iterations, has materialized into this: a long-form zine, printed on public printers, collaged on the floor, assembled in shared spaces. It is an archive, a time capsule, an offering to our commitment to continue with purpose — in collaborative making, in collaborative ways of existence.
zines
Top row: It is all true. by Alana Dao, witness | martyr by Nicole Manganelli, The Mountain Stood Still by Midori Morrow, Everything Comes Undone, We Do This Over and Over. by Raquel P Miller. Bottom row: Glossary by meg willing, Still Lives by Maya Skylark, the church is our bodies, gathered by Maggie Fiori,.
A POSSIBLE PRACTICE: from mine / to keep
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Includes work by Alana Dao, Hannah DeAngelis, Maggie Fiori, Audrey Gidman, Talia Gordon, Molly Hess, Cora Kircher, Nicole Manganelli, Raquel P Miller, Midori Morrow, Sarah Patterson, Maya Skylark, meg willing.
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Full Color Soft Cover | Full Color Interior | Spiral Bound | 63 pages | 8.5” x 11”
artists
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ALANA DAO [@alana.dao] is a mother, writer, and restaurant worker whose creative practice explores contemporary culture, food, and identity. Her work most often takes the form of artists' books, zines, and essays. She received a BA from Smith College and an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is Co-Director of A CLEARING. Born in Texas, she resides in Maine.
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MAGGIE FIORI [@maggiefiori] is a small-scale printmaker and member of Pickwick Independent Press in Portland, Maine. She makes relief and letterpress prints, books, and zines rooted in her experience as a queer Quaker, illustrating her particular experience of God in a way that feels universal. Her work testifies to the embodied experience of some overwhelming, life-transforming mystery.
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NICOLE MANGANELLI [@radicalemprints] is a letterpress printer, poet, and art worker based in the unceded Wabanaki territory known as Portland, Maine. The goal of her printmaking is to nourish organizers of all kinds with fierce, beautiful words that keep people invested in social movement work for the long haul. She also co-facilitates grassroots fundraising & grantwriting trainings for movement organizations with Resource Organizing Project. You can find more of her work at radicalemprints.com or @radicalemprints on Instagram.
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Born and adopted from Cuenca, Ecuador, RAQUEL P MILLER [@raquelpmiller] is an artist living and working from Biddeford, Maine. Through painting, she is interested in unearthing the unexpressed and revealing what cannot be seen–exploring emotions, memory, grief and dreams. She was the recipient of a 2022 BIPOC Fellowship at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In 2023, she was an artist in residence at SPACE Gallery in Portland, ME, and the recipient of the David C. Driskell Fellowship and Residency at Black Seed Studio. She shows her work online and throughout New England.
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MIDORI MORROW [@_midorimorrow_] is an interdisciplinary artist and activist working with photographic installation and printmaking. They received their Associates of Fine Arts in photography from the Delaware College of art and design in 2019, went on to get their Bachelors of Fine Arts in photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2021, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Maine College of Art and Design in 2024. Morrow explores themes of identity and belonging within the Asian American diaspora. Their artistic practice works in tandem with their work as a nuclear peace activist. They have worked with multiple activist groups such as Peace Action and Physicians for Social Responsibility through giving artist talks and showing their art to discuss how the nuclear peace movement can live on within younger generations. In November of 2023 Midori attended as a delegate at the Second Meeting of States Parties at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. In August of 2023 they were the United States Delegate at The World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen bombs, where they participated in workshops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan talking about the movement for nuclear disarmament. They also gave an artist talk at the world conference using their art as an entry point for the conversation of nuclear peace.
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MAYA SKYLARK [@mayaskylark] (any pronouns) writes softly about hard things. Their work combines the rich imagery and metaphors of both textiles and the natural world to explore transformation, death, grief, and renewal. She has self-published her poetry and essays since 2017 and you can read past newsletters on her substack archive: mayaskylark.substack.com.
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MEG WILLING [@megwilling] is a poet, editor, interdisciplinary artist, and book designer. Growing up in Quito, Ecuador; Bangkok, Thailand; Bogotá, Colombia; and various parts of Maine and Massachusetts, she now calls the foothills of Maine home. Her creative work examines the sweet splinterings of memory, belonging, and desire through poetry, collage, cut-up, erasure, and altered books. She currently serves as Art and Design Editor for the literary arts journal Gigantic Sequins; Assistant Manager at Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers; Shop Assistant at Independent Auto Volvo Service; and, with Alana Dao, is the Co-Founder / Co-Director of A CLEARING.
readings
No one creates in a vacuum. This space is dedicated to sharing pieces that are shaping our practices and deepening our understanding of each cycle’s theme. It will be updated bi-monthly with new readings during this active cycle of practice.
The Role of the Poet: An Interview with Solmaz Sharif by Zinzi Clemmons
Thinking about language as a means to know, language as a means to obscure; “the truth beneath the terms”; personal as political, poetry as political, what isn’t political?; war, wartime, historically gendered lines of war; undercurrents of violence; surveillance states; to resist calcification; exilic states of being; generational rifts; moments, movements, the momentum to keep moving; the body, the frame, looking; learning from living poets, from each other; learning to teach; conceptual practices; all-caps as power, as imprint; creative influences; “what our nearnesses are”
“Interactive :: House Saints” by Hala Alyan
Thinking about form / format; what the eyes do on the page; prayer; what’s passed down; ancestral portals; bodies of land, bodies of water, bodies of being; the multiplicities of meaning; time, and return; transformation / transmutation; “The dead are not dead.”; the spirit; the door; the movement of all things, the blue in all things; what home sounds like in the mouth
“Lines Composed While Watching My Mother Buy Tomatoes” by Bee Morris
Thinking about the private / the public / the private in public; mortality, the mortality of everything; a closeness in kinship; to savor the simple; the mystery, blue mystery, the mystery of aliveness; how time becomes visible around us, in us; preparing, (preparing what?), preparing together
“Moving at the Speed of Trust” by Sun Ho Lee
Thinking about: ways to visualize; ways to interact with writing, with art; ways to have a conversation with something / pieces have a conversation amongst themselves; reading in different ways / reading for when we can’t read; slowing down to the speed we need; kinship and kindreds; creating within community; trusting the in-between, the margins, the not quite there…yet?; the intimacies of spaces where we share our work; guideposts; reassurances; showing up; what connects us to each other?; what connections are wiry and strong, what connections snap?; attention to detail, attention to each other; to ask, to keep asking, to forever ask so that we continue to learn
“Meditations in an Emergency” by Cameron Awkward-Rich
Thinking about: the value of slow practice; how a poem changes over time, how the way we read a poem changes over time; how it hits, how it hurts; the lines that echo across years; “I wake up & it breaks my heart.”; the multiplicity of feeling, to break and be broken while striving to heal; humanity, humanity in the details; to keep feeling, feeling in the heart; the dream, our dream, of collective care
“Remedy for Social Overexposure” by Sandra Cisneros
Thinking about: balance / finding the balance; being in nature, with nature; being without expectation / being in our senses; stillness, quiet; regulating the nervous system; seeking what heals us; a remedy, a salve; to move against the harshness of the world; to ground and reground; allowing a slow down; our affinities; crisp white, soft white; the moonlight, the moon, the moon in a bowl sleeping beside us
“In the Garden with Ocean Vuong” from The Pink House with Sam Smith
Thinking about: truth in simplicity; the places that ground us; the places we’re witnessed / the places where we’re seen; “writing is the art of misunderstanding”; what is finished work? / the life work has once it’s left the writer’s hand; “you can be vulnerable and still survive”; vulnerability as a natural state; the intimacy of conversation, of being in conversation; food / music / language as a collage of connection; houses as homes; creating a community space for creation; learning outside of institutions; "survival is not an aftermath", "survival is a creative act"; the vulnerabilities of deep appreciation, of saying it, sharing it; types of intimacies; soft prompts; gateways to memory; moods and musicality; framing your work on your own terms; women elders, queer elders; surviving with yourself intact
All Fours by Miranda July
Thinking about: doing what we want / judgements about doing what we want; freedom - floaty and frothy; the vulnerability of dance, of movement; moving however one wants; the mundanity and morose characterlessness of meal planning for children - extra protein waffles; plush wool carpeting; pressing our fingers against a vintage coverlet filled with flowers, birds, all things “feminine”; what it means to be a multi-hyphenate; having a sense of humor about it; how we engage with our own curiosities; how we choose to communicate; engineering private escape(s); types of loneliness and/or aloneness; types of intimacy and/or intimacies; feasts of sumptuous detail; emotional honesty; sheer possibility; the exquisiteness of surprise
“The World Has Need of You” by Ellen Bass
Thinking about: “What if you felt the invisible / tug between you and everything?”; (we do); our instincts; legacy or lineage?; what follows; what we can or can’t imagine; spaces on the edge; a light when we can’t make out what’s around us; embodiment; what’s learned through the body, what’s passed down through the body; “It’s a hard time to be human.”; prayer; prayer as motion, as action, as liberated of language; the liminal; the thinning veil; the aliveness of the world; the rawness of feeling, of articulating the feeling, of staying with the moment; attentiveness / attention; porousness; freedom in the wind, the grounding of gravity; what connect us — to each other and to everything; what’s visible; what’s invisible; the value of the invisible; the invisible hands at work
Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines, Edited by Branden W. Joseph and Drew Sawyer
Thinking about: the archive; what’s transferred through paper, through the physicality of paper; print as a portal through time; collaborators; artists and artists groups; context / contextualizing; wells of inspiration; dreaming into a space; making art for ourselves, making art in community, making art for each other
“Vulnerability Study” by Solmaz Sharif (again)
Thinking about: what it means to stay present in a poem for a week / a month / a year?; what lines do we keep coming back to?; what images call to our attention?; what happens when we share the poem again–with each other, with you, within different circles of closeness?; what does vulnerability mean to you?; shared with others, what does that connection feel like?; the proximity of our faces; types of intimacies; the color of a bowl, the gift of water, of access to water; how do our imaginations add more to the scene?; how is this a kind of porousness?; love, as action, as promise; undercurrents of violence; war; what’s left?; the skeleton of a building; a sediment; how histories move through us, how stories move through us, how the past moves through us; “a wall cleared of nails / for the ghosts to walk through”
“Revolutionary Letter #68: Life Chant” by Diane Di Prima
Thinking about: continuance, continuity; moments of clarity; spell casting, ritual; reciting poems aloud as spell casting, ritual; repetition / the comfort of repetition / repetition without redundancy; humanity in the details; poetry everywhere, alive, in the turquoise ocean, in sisterhood, in our own simple breath; poetry as balm; the multitudinousness of life; the richness of life; the details!; reciprocity; relationality; bell hooks’ All About Love; looking up at the night sky: the stars, the planet-like stars, the moon as it changes; writing, gathering, making something; “we begin the work / may it continue”; may it continue
I Saw a Beautiful Woodpecker by Michał Skibiński
Thinking about: assignments; the archive; humanity in the details; mapping the subtle shifts / the not-so-subtle shifts around us; attentiveness; the practice of handwriting / the impact of the handwritten; handwriting as image; image as image; what an image can provoke; truth in simplicity; histories held and continued on the page
"anti poetica” by Danez Smith
Thinking about: what is a poem?; devotion to the poem / devotion to the day-to-day; the conflict; what is tangible?; what is valuable?; nothing is ever given or so simple; action as an embodied poem; the ways in which we are needed / the ways in which we need; a key to the locks - even a key gets stuck in a lock; a poem may not free you, but maybe a poem can get you deeper, darker, hotter; where can we find them? / how do we get out of this place? (not unscathed, but with tenderness intact); to be in the world, to really be in the world, to be in the world with each other—