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. ♡

artists

  • janan alexandra is the author of the poetry collection come from (BOA Editions). The recipient of support from the Mellon Foundation, the Fulbright program, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, janan is a 2025 Djanikian Scholar in Poetry and won the 2023 Adrienne Rich Award for her poem, “On Form & Matter.” Since 2015, janan has taught creative writing in schools, libraries, youth centers, zoom rooms, and carceral spaces. Along with language work, janan has facilitated restorative movement classes; nannied for families; welded ice cream scoops; tied oyster nets; tended land and animals; built furniture; baked bread; painted houses; and busked to make a living. She currently teaches at Indiana University and at the Monroe Country Correctional Center, edits poetry at The Rumpus, and helps curate MONDAYS ARE FREE, a Substack collaboration between BFF poets Ross Gay and Pat Rosal.

  • Julia Arredondo is a traveling Tejana with working-class roots, navigating the changing landscape of creative economies within the United States. Arredondo is formally trained in printmaking and specializes in artistic forms of independent publishing, having founded Vice Versa Press and Curandera Press as entrepreneurial debuts. Her practice explores alternative empowerment and reimagines business structures and spiritual philosophies as platforms for play and experimentation. Arredondo currently lives and works in Portland, Maine.

  • 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.

  • Serena Himmelfarb (they/ them) studied film and visual art at Hampshire College, and received their MFA at California Institute for the Arts. From 2019-2022, they were a Five College Assistant Visiting Professor of Art based at Hampshire College, where they taught Installation and Experimental Form, Painting, Drawing, Art & Politics, and a collaborative, interdisciplinary seminar, The Sound of Life.

  • Tobey Katt (they) is a white, trans* documentarian, interdisciplinary artist, community arts organizer, and maker of gay objects.

    Their work explores the intimacies of debauchery and mourning, holding queerness and play at the center as sites of power and compassion. Often in collaboration, they experiment in pursuit of fellowship; using alternative photographic processes, strange little paintings, eulogies, and participatory performance. These gestures suggest that grief and joy are not in conflict, but bound together. Each giving shape to the other.

    Tobey received a BA in Sculpture from Towson University and is a co-facilitator for The School of the Alternative, a radical arts school in Black Mountain, North Carolina. You can find them at their most disguised during the annual Mummers Parade, where they perform rituals of public resistance, in pursuit of JOY, as part of the Vaudevillians New Year’s Brigade. 

    To learn more, flirt, or tell them a story, please email them tobeykatt@gmail or @tobeykatt.

    They are based in gorgeous Western Maine, but are forever grateful to be from Baltimore, Maryland.

  • Sydney S. Kim (she/they) is a queer, Korean-American writer and artist based in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art and BA from Dartmouth College. Her literary work can be found in Nat. Brut, Wigleaf, and Wildness. Her visual art has been published by and featured in A History of Frogs, Publication Studio, and Social Malpractice. She is a reader for Wigleaf’s Top 50. Her middle name is Sujin.

  • Addison Namnoum (b. 1992) is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary artist based in midcoast Maine. She received her BA in Human Ecology at College of the Atlantic in 2014 and her MFA in Studio Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. Her artwork has been shown in New York, Switzerland, Baltimore, Portland, Philadelphia, and Kansas City. She has taught and made speaking and guest critic appointments at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Moore College of Art and Design. Recently she completed residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Pink Noise Projects.

  • Sarah Patterson is a graphic designer and maker. Her work involves themes of the natural world, mother/daughterhood, archiving, memory, and handwriting. She likes the routine of daily projects. Her favorite mediums include collage, drawing, and printmaking. She received her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has been an artist-in-residence at Monson Arts, Peters Valley School of Craft, Design Inquiry, and Bearnstow.

  • Maria Pinto is an author, educator, and mycophile living in the Boston area. Her work has appeared or will appear in Orion Magazine, Longreads, Necessary Fiction, and Arnoldia. She has led workshops and given lectures for mycological societies in New York, Texas, Wisconsin, and California, and she leads regular forays at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Look for her book of essays inspired by mushrooms, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival out with Great Circle Books. 

  • Sarah Shaw is a visual storyteller and professor. She makes autobiographical, socio-political, and historical comics with a handmade, decorative flair. She also crafts visual essays, zines, and comics poems that capture the everyday. She lives in Maine with her partner and dog. 

  • meg willing is a poet, editor, interdisciplinary artist, and book designer. 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.

“Dear Diary, The World Is Burning” by Katy Waldman

Thinking about diary as companion, as confidant, as friend; (who is allowed to read this diary?); diary as tool, as technology, as archive; (“what functions do such records serve in moments of crisis?”); our private lives; intimacy on the page; the witness, the record, the catalog; the suffering; the alchemy; experience as sacred; shaping our “not-knowing into language”