I was born in the upstairs apartment of my parents’ small gas station on the Oregon coast, in the late 1970s. In the small handful of family photos that exist, there are chickens and cats and wood piles, and I am peering out of cardboard boxes meant for oranges. Everything is repurposed. There is an ocean, and a creek, and a blur of sand. Capitalism is losing. The summer I turned two, the gas station went completely out of business, and the building burned to the ground. The rest of my childhood, I lived in buses, trailers, garages, an occasional duplex, a rental farmhouse in a flood plain. In rural Southwest Washington, literacy arrived in the form of a traveling library van, which parked itself between the Bank of the Pacific and Okie’s Select Market, just off Route 4. I looked forward to that weekly trip to our library van with a hunger that surpassed any of my other hungers. With a lot of work (bucking hay, babysitting, cleaning dormitories, other manual labor) and the opportunity of need-based government grants, scholarships, and tax-funded-state college, I attended Western Washington University, and earned a BA in English Literature and Education. I have since taught high school, then community college, been a visiting fellow at Oxford, an editor, and community arts organizer. My most satisfying work is the time I spend with people who want to pursue possibilities via imagination and language, and I am fortunate to do that in my teaching career—both via Central Washington University’s MA and BA programs, and in Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA, as well as in community workshops, libraries, and other venues.

I used to play this memory imagination game with my children, that involved recalling a time before we were human, when our star matter belonged to other shapes and lives: “When I was a tree,” or “When I was a sea urchin” . . . and continuing by finishing that sentence. So, as an example, I might have said something like, “When I was a western redcedar, my roots were often thirsty. I could feel when you walked over them,” and my daughter might have said, “When I was a violin, I knew a bow by heart in my deep cave.”

The outcome, I guess, was that by imagining ourselves into one of the various past iterations of self, or in thinking of the needs of other-than-human-entities, we could both remember that we all contain a lot of versions of ourselves, and also imagine ways to make more space for the many versions of life around us. I want to keep opening out, but also in. I want to view the world as permeable and possible, for more of us than it was yesterday. Memory of my life—my lives—before this moment helps me keep doing that.

Oh dear! This is a huge question, because of Lorca’s “rim of the wound” and how proximate to it I have been recently (we all have been?!). Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca said that our forms often change and shift during times of great crisis. The past few years have brought intense ekphrasis, dreamscape, and collaboration. My work has moved between genres—poetry, prose fiction/hybrid, and essay; between received and invented forms. Poems invented themselves as “ekphrasonnets,” or ekphrastic sonnets, with lots of negative space and erasure aesthetics, sprawling out on the field of the page, tiptoeing into spells and the necropastoral; at other times they hugged left margins, trying to make sense to themselves. Prose works came out as hexes or recipes. And essays continued to wander, folding in poetics. Lorca’s “thistle and terminal stones” remain constants—duende coming up through the soles of the feet, sometimes from wet earth and sometimes mica dust. I don’t know. For a while, I was writing in lines. Now I’m writing in strange, squiggly circles, maybe even hexagons?

In her poem “Song,” Brigit Pegeen Kelly famously begins:

Creative practice is the goat’s head singing despite disembodiment. And art is a spellspace. It is going to keep singing whether we will it or not—it keeps itself moving forward. It is a vibration, a song.

I think creating is transcribing that song, which begins by listening—to the images and music of the world, and to the images and music of other arts. As artists, our charge is to take it in. When I create with intention, I do so to help remember and imagine other versions of the world than the one I live in, presently. I create because it feeds my own hunger; I hope it feeds someone else, too. I create because it connects me with others who love to make: meaning, weirdness, beauty, revelation. I create because it answers a primal call in me, but also, I hope, it makes me more civil.

When I applied for this fellowship, I was living through a gutting divorce, and I was trying to figure out how—if at all—I might retain the house my children and I live in. I needed rest and space and safety and support, and this award, frankly, allowed a sliver of that. It offered resources to help stabilize my life, and to work on two projects—one a hybrid novel, spurred by themes unfinished in my memoir: whales and ocean consciousness, place-as-character, and sexual identity; and two, my memoir revision, which led to its acceptance for publication! All of the themes of both these projects grow out of/add to my existing interests in animacy, memory, empathy, and the ways that the poverty of the earth is tied to the poverty of the self; to have that kind of poetics receive funding feels like a propulsive hope. I am grateful to share that Raised by Ferns will be out in early 2026 from Porphyry Press.

In the field of creative writing (outside of screenwriting), we are generally asked to adhere to three primary genres: poetry, fiction, or nonfiction. My work often blurs, blends, and overlaps these, experimentally, and even when it can be called one or the other, it borrows from other fields, such as physics, biology, botany, and education/pedagogy, to create curious experiences of un-silo-ing our thinking and bringing us back to wonder(ing). Artist Trust seems to understand that most of us working in any discipline are really cross-genre—and it rewards us, I think, for those overlapping aesthetics/impulses. Thank you! I would encourage Artist Trust to keep doing that. I also support increased programming (and celebrations like galas) rooted in geographic communities across the state—maybe locating more in Ellensburg, Walla Walla, Wenatchee; Port Angeles, Bellingham; Spokane. There are some wonderful cross-disciplinary arts communities in these cities, all of us in need of resources. And smaller towns, too: I’m thinking of places reached by the Timberland Regional Library System—those little burgs in the Southwest corner of the state, full of dreaming people who are waiting for their inter library loans to roll in . . .