Old-fashioneds & a red light room.

Toward ways to live as a creative human in this chaos.

While we were living in Europe, we realized that the idea of home was changing. We were going farther from the notion of a home as object or a sense of fixedness rather than closer to it. Since we returned to Canada, we’ve arrived in a kind of wander in place, une promenade sur place.

Snow days in Kitsilano, January 2024.

We now stay in two small, light-filled rooms looking out to a roof garden. English Bay and the north mountain range are in our view. We’re in the Kitsilano neighborhood of Vancouver, BC, on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. We are on the third floor of an apartment building with a Whole Foods market on the bottom floor, on a street surrounded by eclectic restaurants, bustling cafes, hip fashion, and seaside parks. The first voices I hear in the morning are seabirds. Many days, the view is fog and rain.

We found this apartment here when we were traveling, after we saw some pictures of the place. We haven’t ever lived close enough to a city to be able to walk to its tallest buildings, its busiest markets. Here in Kits, there’s a walk along the shore where we have seen ducks and geese and seals. A record-breaking cold arrived on my birthday in mid-January, and then days of snow, and since we are here without boots or winter gear, we went out walking in layers of clothing. We are still living with what we packed in our suitcases in August, when we thought we would only be wandering for three months. Now we are moving into our six month with our things in storage, and no desire to go get them.

When we left for Europe, I’d loaded the car with towels, blankets and our pillows. I had a bag of books and a satchel of my nonfiction research, just in case I had to edit my books (again.) Richard laughed when I insisted on packing the camp pots, and then he couldn’t live without the French press and the tea kettle and found spots to stuff them in the back of the car. A box of spices, Southern grains, heirloom beans, our bikes, and our Last Will and Testament went into my friend’s garage. In December, when we found this sparsely furnished short-term rental, we borrowed kitchen supplies from friends and then moved in one trip over the border. It’s little more than what we had when we first lived together as university students, and it’s perfect.

The old-fashioned doughnut & the red room, 2024.

In the past seven years we lived near wilderness, in Banff, a mountain tourist town where there was always access to the backcountry and the quiet of nature.¹ In the city, you have to learn how to find the silence, how to burrow into your place so that everything isn’t jarring and strange and overwhelming. In a small town, I rarely found things that I needed to acquire, but here, I can see a dozen things a day that scream to be bought. Instead of following that noise, we purchased some red light bulbs for the rented lamps in the bedroom, and we turn them on at five in the afternoon and make our lair in there with blankets.² We touch skin. We read. We tell stories. We watch the shift of the greys and blues as far as we can see. We guess the day that spring flowers might arrive on the sidewalks and in the gardens. I practice surrendering the guilt that always comes when I’m not being supremely productive. He’s rarely had guilt or shame, at least since his brain injury/liberation, and so I fit myself to his smile, allow my blood to be restored by his calm.

I fight in the night, terrors that come to my body, which is a side effect of being sensitive in populated places, and too, in living in a time where we watch brutalities live-streamed on our phones, and then cry to our governments to end them. In the dark, R knows to place his hand on my skin when I scream, to softly say my name. When we were in Greece and Italy, we could swim through the grief, it was into the healing sea every day, waves over my hair, local sea salt by the pinchful into my mouth. Here in Canada, to calm my nerves, it’s baths of spruce, it’s apples and cheese, it’s choosing to buy locally, seasonally, it’s pleasure activism, it’s cultivating interdependence and resilience, becoming active in communal care.

Something changed on the road, something that’s still surfacing, something tricky to articulate. I think it has to do with holding things lightly, with asking ourselves who is the one who seeks this _____ and for what? Some days on the road we were empty of the habits that required us to be fixed, or anything really. This recent journey has included a dissolving of a kind of functional fixedness, of noticing the ways we desire, and when that includes a feeling of ownership of a place. Owning things is a very colonial preoccupation. The re-imagining we did out there (and is still happening) has become a kind of object lesson about when something is standing in for what you actually want. For example, “home” becoming the thing we use to get peace, or family, or a creative life, or communal support. Here, home is aligned with land, it’s a body at home with things as they are, home is already here, the search can end.

Love and fear are teaching me to come home to what I am, to experience the freedom which is already here. This shift has made me think more about what I go to art for.

Yesterday we walked in the slush to the winter-frosted beach. Even on a weekend, there was such tranquility. He doesn’t talk much and so I had lots of time to think about art, to send silent, sweet gratitude to my friends who are devoting their lives to making books and films and music, to revisit the places of my memory where I have entered into artistic experiences that reformed what I thought was possible here. And by here, I mean, here, on this 21^st century earth where art can’t save people being murdered by racism, apartheid, and genocide, but still, art might show us what’s really happening under the surface of things, might share how to hold each other and restore our communities. This is to say that art and social justice ride together.

This year I’m working on three books. An essay collection is with a publisher, a novel is walking through changes after fine attention from an editor, another book is just being formed in notes and impressions. These offerings all require a deep presence, but the youngest is a little bird who needs my open hearted attention. It is for her that I make soups, that I go into the quiet, that I engage with other artists. This is community-making. First the work comes through my body, then into relationship with others, then in the vulnerability of being known. So far, these particular works have required me to generously care for others, to make amends, to become sensitive, to truth-tell, to be powerful, to be respectful of other’s cultures and ways.

The most extraordinary learning happened in publishing my first book, and they came through being with a literary and artistic community. I’d already taken classes with the great Priscilla Long, who continues to inspire me to be committed to my work. I’d already begun writing reviews. I’d always loved going to readings of other writers. I was aware that I was creating home as community.  I became aware of a lineage formed from those artists who had influenced me. What I needed then, and still need now, was to speak the book in front of others. My lands, as my Mimoo used to say in recognition of the great surprises and miracles of life,³ all the writers and readers showed up that year to listen and to read with me, and to let the work live in them too.

This week, on the way home from the beach, we bought Lucky’s doughnuts because I wanted to taste some of my favorite kind of art, what comes as nourishment and tradition and ceremony. Later, when we ate the chocolate-orange old-fashioned under the red light, I remembered I wanted to share with you something that I’m learning about community-making—that we’re in a time when we are developing the skills to radically transform how we relate to each other. I see it everywhere I look, all of my kin, trying their skills, even when they fail.

adrienne maree brown says:

“individualism – personal individualism and national or patriotic individualism – has created a loneliness amongst humans which is not survivable. the tendency to fight for what is ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ at the cost of what is ‘yours’ or ‘theirs’ means that we can become convinced that we must destroy in order to protect what belongs to us, even if that destruction is of our very selves. but everything we destroy is part of the meta-system that we too must exist on... in community, our potential is truly realized. what we have to offer to each other is not merely critique, anger, commentary, ownership and false power. we have the capacity to hold each other, serve each other, heal each other, create for and with each other, forgive each other, and liberate ourselves and each other.”⁴

I see you out there, not just continuing with the buying and bullshitting and fragmentation that we have sometimes done because we’re seeking something else. I see movements away from loneliness and conflict beginning in communities. I’ve seen them in my classrooms, both online and with our bodies in a room. I’ve noticed how we can create spaces that allow us to become witnesses to fresh work. I’ve seen how that weave has continued past the workshop, how writing retreats that I’ve led turned into writing groups who met for years, how writers from years ago still meet on Monday mornings to make their books. I think there’s a necessary power in centering these kinds of practices, of making your own red room, of knitting your relationships into it, to love with what’s real. We are not selves that only seek, we are interconnected, we are already whole.

I hope you’re finding what makes your art durable in this time. I’m grateful for you being here in this community with Wanderland, and for your support, whether that’s as a free or paid subscriber. Thanks for writing and connecting any time that something intrigues you.

If you have a moment, share in the comments what you’re doing/being these days to live in an artful way. I’d love to hear from you.

I’ve included information below where I’m making community with other writers this year. Join us if you would like to meet some wonderful humans.

Argentina Santos, 1924-2019. A cook who wandered the tables of a Lisbon restaurant singing Fado. When her two marriages ended, she was finally free to pursue her art.

Next time at Wanderland, I’m writing on how Lisbon agitated me, and then everything turned when we came upon one of the great fado houses of Portugal.

Writing Community:

Liberating Narratives (May 2024) Come join me at Corporeal Writing online for a wild, shapeshifting adventure with ways to get free with our work. Register at the link.

Vision & Lineage: Food Writing As Ceremony. I’m holding a retreat in autumn of 2024. Write me for details or check them out here.

Suzanne Morrison and I are teaching together again. Join us this spring for generative writing workshops in Seattle, WA. Disconnect from social media, family responsibilities, and anything else that keeps you from your writing. Our events are designed to break through barriers to completing your book.

Suzanne and Sonya's team teaching process affords writers an opportunity to learn craft lessons across a range of experiences, in both fiction and nonfiction narratives. Each day will begin with a craft talk, followed by prompts and questions that focus on getting new work on the page. Whether you are working on fiction or nonfiction, are just getting started or have a draft underway, our in-city two-day retreats will help you move your writing into exciting new territory.

Applications upon request.

Birthday, 2024, Tintype.

I’m Watching:

Moved by the courage and creativity explored in American Symphony, about musician Jon Batiste and his attempt to compose a symphony as his partner, writer Suleika Jaouad, undergoes cancer treatment. Michelle and Barack Obama’s company Higher Ground have executive produced this film.

I learned that the President did this campaign for those people who are surviving with blood cancers, like Jaouad, as well as those living with blood disorders, like myself. If you can donate funds to campaigns like this, it really is helpful for people with blood diseases. But too, my body and many others survive on donations of plasma, and I’m grateful for everyone who can give blood and plasma. It’s a profound gift. Especially when you know that Canada is forced to buy plasma from the U.S. because there aren’t enough donors here.

A film that asks us to think differently about victimhood, Anatomy of a Fall was absolutely captivating, and I’m thrilled that its lead, Sandra Hüller, was nominated for an Oscar. Your desire to root for someone will be, alas, uprooted.

Past Lives. I loved watching Greta Lee and her fab wardrobe in The Morning Show. Here she is in this tender film articulating something so powerful about identity and love of more than one. This piece on the chemistry between the actors also speaks about the ways the eyes carry so much of ourselves. Lee got blocked out of an Oscar nomination, but this is the performance that you really have to see.

Huberman, on avoiding colds & flu. Strategizing all winter and any time I need to travel.

I’m Reading:

This piece on small press economies

Chuck Wendig on AI & art. Whoa.

I’m also reading works in progress, a new libretto from a composer, a book that I’m editing for a writer friend, a business plan for an artist. These are my strongest relationships as a writer, the ones I share with community.

I’m Listening To:

This one from Dolly Parton with Emmylou and Linda. And if you’re into that, this podcast.

KEXP’s Sound and Vision exploring the Palestinian struggle through music.

Tyson Yunkaporta on being materially and fiscally decolonial.

Besides Doughnuts, I’m Eating:

This power bowl.

This ginger garlic broccoli. South River Miso changed the way I think about fermented foods, thanks to my friend Debra Carlson, who made me a delicious miso soup at our writing group, and then taught me how to make it.

Miso-tahini sauce on everything.

You can find Sonya at~

My Instagram.

My Website.

The podcast I did with my kid.

1. TBH, until the arrival of a chronic illness, when that wild became difficult to get into due to fatigue, and my blood count being so low that I had to be near a hospital at times.

2. Listening to Rick Rubin and others on the connection between creativity and sensitivity inspired me to go for red light to help restore my body.

3. My lands sometimes also said as lans, was a euphemism for My Lord, according to my maternal grandmother, but also some dictionaries. I’m exploring the connection between these folklore words I grew up with and their connection to land. See the Dictionary of American Regional English, Volume III by Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall (1996, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, England). Page 284.

4. The thinking and activism of adrienne maree brown on relationships and communal life is a wild moor here. This quote is from an early piece of writing, and you can find this same specific notion of care in all of her books and podcasts.