Featured in The Rumpus, my first pub of 2022: “We drove under power lines with putty-colored plastic spheres threaded through the center, dotting the skyline. I asked him what they were for. ‘That’s where someone threw their ball in the air and it got stuck.'”
A lyric essay I wrote about art and quilting and grief and hope and love featured in Michigan Quarterly Review.
Writing is work. I write despite the fear of being judged, of making a mistake, of losing a loved one. I write despite deciding there’s nothing new left to say, that it’s all been said before.
My writing mood board full of quotes, color symbolism, and textile art collected over several years
“I wrote about my dolls. I wrote about the dogs I owned on a video game. I don’t recall a point in time when I consciously thought about the transition from reader-only to reader-writer. It just happened.”
“Skilled writers…see the sentence as the ur-unit, the granular element that must be got right or nothing will be right.”
Marc Kaminsky: “…the saddest thing is to see a person struggle week after week against the knowledge of who he is, the knowledge that is always trying to come home to him.”
“I strive to be ‘excruciatingly authentic’ as some have put it. I speak openly about topics that hurt me, in the hope that voicing my experiences might make life easier in some way for others in similar circumstances.”
I see much of my work as blocks of text that are made up of sentences, which are made up of words, and each of those words and sentences and blocks of text are modular—I can move them around as I see fit.
Donna Tallent 