I once thought
A diary collaboration in conversation with
Victoria Chang’s poem “Passage.”
Passage
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone's hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn't that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection. A few of her other books include The Trees Witness Everything, OBIT, and Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. She has written several children’s books as well. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech. Visit her website at victoriachangpoet.com.
Victoria Chang, “Passage” from The Trees Witness Everything. Copyright © 2022 by Victoria Chang. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.
poem
through this poem, we will ask:
How can the diary be a radical space to share the experiences that shock us into being? Into belonging? How can the deliberate practice of recording our daily lives strengthen our resolve to stay engaged with the present moment, to not turn away? What awakens within us when we intentionally witness ourselves / witness others / allow others to witness us? What can we unlock with a passage of writing within this passage of time?
thinking about:
the power of observing; the power of recording the details; the ephemerality of life; the many meanings of the word passage; the archive; the seasons; the magical and the mundane; (what to do with it all); falling vs feeling; this diary, this container for falling and feeling; simplicity, and the simplicity of knowing; grief, and the process of grief; (what to do with it all); epiphanies; revelations; simultaneity; our capacity to change; touch; searching; belonging; movement (a lesson, a learning); the leaves; seeing ourselves; seeing ourselves — all of ourselves — in the leaves
Unlike past cycles, we chose the medium of the diary before choosing our theme poem. Suleika Jaouad’s The Book of Alchemy provided a generous expanse for experimentation, for trying on what this medium could look like in action. Remarkable Dairies helped ground the practice visually and historically. In a moment of bibliomancy, meg came across the words, “Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence…” reaffirming the diary as a radical space. What would it mean to document our small truths? On a larger scale, we see this happening around us as writers, journalists, children and youth record their small truths everywhere: kids with the cats that provide comfort in Palestine, journalists remapping freed prisons in Syria, all emphasizing the importance of the record, the archive, the power of documenting.
In our fifth year of this project and suddenly committed to this medium, we found ourselves in a peculiar situation akin to finding a lock to fit a key. What poem would speak to this sea of considerations? Over the course of three months, we narrowed our list of ten possible down to three, then to one, then back up to three, then to one, then to four, then in desperation we reconsidered everything on the list again. We annotated everything and shared our annotations. So many of these poems have sprawling drafts of our questions, our thinking abouts. In the end, the theme poem for this cycle was the first one we’d shared with each other, and returned to with fresh eyes and clear knowing: Victoria Chang’s “Passage”. A passage of a diary. A passage of time. A passage from one phase to the next, one world into the next.
Our reading list will be full of these poems from our pockets, and so many other pieces we shared with each other throughout the slow, delicate process of deciding.
Do you want to participate in this project? We will announce our community open call in the coming months, asking writers and artists of any medium, based anywhere, to send us one diary entry in conversation with our theme created during our open call window. Pieces from the open call will be shared in a window display at Twice Sold Tales in Farmington, ME. More details will be announced soon. Know someone who might be interested in taking part this year? Help us spread the word! Is it you? Let’s make some art together. ♡