My first essay to be published in a literary magazine is in print! “Easter Peas” is a personal narrative about how I learned to plant seeds in a greenhouse on a tiny island in the Salish Sea. Seeds need contact with soil. They need warmth, water, and sun. They need care. And up this close, they are little worlds of wonder. (What are those ridges and bumps for?)
Propogating seeds day after day in the 2004 growing season cracked open my own hard shell. For the first time in years, I felt warmth. I wasn’t afraid of the dark. I began to stir. I am so grateful to Whitefish Review for choosing to publish my essay in their Issue “Seeds.”
And listen, I’m not one to read too much into things, unless they are beautiful poems, but my essay is only four doors down from an essay by one of my favorite authors, also from the Northwest, who wrote my favorite book so far, “Sun House.” Before that book, he wrote another favorite book, “My Story As Told By Water.”
To find my writing sharing the same pages of this publication was to find myself gratitudinally wordless and gravitationally unbound. DJD, I’ve written you a letter I will send soon to tell you how many seeds you’ve planted in your writing that have grown to provide everyone who reads you with sustenance, beauty, shade, breeze dances, and that kind of mystery that leaves us standing in utter, melted awe that we are here to experience life together.
Motherlife 