Tag: writer

Fantasy Candle Out Now!

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“Men, what exactly is the nature of Enlightenment?” he asks.

I clench my fist. I’ve heard this conversation countless times before.

The stories of men will always be the same. 

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I never imagined I’d create a custom candle, let alone put out and publish this book or any of my books if I’m being honest. Months ago, if you asked me about any of this, I’d consider it ludicrous. 

I think for the longest time I convinced myself I wasn’t worthy of the words put to the page — that they held no weight or meaning. Now, three books later, I think I’ve realized how we all underestimate our abilities as dreamers and creators of our own realities. 

We convince ourselves we aren’t good enough or strong enough or creative enough because we’re secretly afraid of our luster and shine. I think in the most becoming way we’re secretly terrified of our most earnest desires for our lives.

So, in the nature of these stories, I’d like to offer an alternative — a manifest desire formed beyond this candle’s glow.

What if we shine? 

What if we write new stories and greet them at the door?

What if we dream of enlightenment? 

The Nature of Enlightenment, the custom candle, is now on sale! ✨

The Council of Amara Custom Candle

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The Nature of Enlightenment, out January 14th.

I think I’ve always defined myself as an artist above all else and expression has been the one umbrella, which defines all the work I do.

When I decided to make a custom candle and collaborate with @wildblackthorn to bring all these ideas into reality, I remembered thinking to myself how can I add another layer to the stories I’ve created, how can I contemplate the scents I’ve layered in naturally as a writer and bring another touch of the ephemeral and physical for you as you read The Council of Amara.

As an artist, one of my favorite endeavors is to bring all ideas from the ether and into the physical. It’s my favorite part of what I do and it’s why I love the muse.

I wanted to capture the unseen in this candle. I wanted to capture the scent of enlightenment in this candle — of coffee shops where intellectuals wrote, of horses on a dirty, dusty bustling road, of a kind offering being made to a young, wide-eyed girl: a pair of old ladies gloves.

I wanted to trace the scent between intellectual and find the rough, heady undertones, which marked it all.

Perhaps, above all else, I wanted to follow Isla’s footsteps in the place between it all as she strived to follow the scents she had grown up with and find her way home to the nature of enlightenment as she understood it to be.

Mark your calendars. The Nature of Enlightenment will be yours on January 14th.

The Council of Amara Release

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The Council of Amara

In less than a week, my book will be in your hands. In one way or another, I’ve been working on these stories for at least three years now, but I’d like to say in theory I’ve been working on them since the day I was born. For me, these characters came in traces, captured in recollection.

Some of these stories began in a dream — in a woman’s voice; in a woman I wrote to understand. During my senior year of college, I wrote and defended a creative honors thesis, which included the linked short stories you will have in your hands soon. I spoke about the women I’ve always desired to see on the page — strong, flawed, and feminine heroines who didn’t always get everything right, but still persevered despite their limitations. I sought to seek strength in vulnerability and in the type of traits often characterized as weak. After years of witnessing hyper-masculinized and over-sexualized women on my television, I became fed up with the narrative currently surrounding strong female characters.

So, I wrote these stories. I wrote about women who weren’t necessarily strong in the masculine sense of the word, but were strong nevertheless in all their femininity. I never imagined I’d publish these stories once I completed my thesis, but something in me told me to release them like paper airplanes onto the world.

You won’t have to wait that much longer until these stories are yours, too.

I hope in this shared, liminal space you find exactly what you need to in the words I’ve written to this page.

The Council of Amara will be yours on December 31st.

Soften this Sadness

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Nobody told me how to use my voice. Nobody told me how to write my poetry although they most certainly tried to.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is that it’s difficult to emerge sometimes from challenging situations with a heart full of gratitude and softer eyes for having undergone such tribulations.

But that’s what I strive to do every day — to emerge sweet despite the contrast, which has informed my pathway and candid resolution.

I think that every word I share on this blog and in my life has been marked by the promise to soften to these words and moments in this liminal space.

Because the more I live, the more I’m beginning to realize that those who’ve hurt me didn’t realize they could have realized better in their lives. The way I see it, every emotion at one point existed as suppressed sadness. When I sit with that cardinal fact, I’m left speechless in all honesty.

So, I present you with this oath, this sentimental promise: I will continue writing candidly in this space because every emotion, which has passed before me was once repressed by him and her and all those who did not believe in me because they could not realize better for themselves.

Capturing Cupid’s Wings

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I’ve been waiting to write this post for a while because I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to say, but I figured I’d take a stab in the dark, or as I’d prefer to view it, lean in closer to reveal the sight of Cupid with a single lantern.

See, I think it’s one thing to say you believe in miracles and then another entirely to say you’ve co-created a miracle.

Growing up, I used to hear that miracles occurred once in a blue moon — a distant reminder speaking to the mundane origins of our world and our respective lives within it.

Then, I grew up. Even so, as I progressed in my spiritual journey, I still believed in miracles — in synchronicities orchestrated by the divine: a force greater than me, and in some small way related to me.

But I had never experienced the kiss of a miracle before. I charted doves and prayed to candles — to my ancestors, to God and even to some form of a higher power. My tears formed a heart — an answered clarifier to all my questions I imposed, but still, I hadn’t seen it.

I hadn’t seen the elusive miracle latent on my cinema screen.

Until a few weeks ago.

Months ago, I knew I would be going to New York with my best friend. I hadn’t made any plans, had no idea why, but then through a series of shocking, sentimental, challenging events, I came to understand just how miracles come to be.

Because I believe we orchestrate miracles in our lives when we ask for them and when we listen to the signs of the divine. I believe we are of the divine and I believe there is nothing too large, which can compare to the magnitude of our souls.

So, I’ve written this post because I’d like to understand it. I’d like to trace the outlines of a miracle and see what it means once realized in my life.

And I think just this time I’ve traced Cupid’s wings as he departs Psyche’s reaching arms.

Will You Burn This For Me?

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Love One Another By Zelda Fitzgerald

I’ve been thinking about the impermanence of art as marked by its materials, whether it be composed on paper, canvas, or any medium in between.

Sappho, a famous Ancient Greek poet, left us with many fragments as the papyrus used to contain her poetry was torn or damaged in several places, leaving up with pieces of stanzas, forever marking how we as readers interact with her art.

Then, several thousands of years later, we come into contact with writers like Zelda Fitzgerald — a talented writer and a painter, her wide-expansing talents unrecognized even to this day. She was overshadowed by her husband F. Scott Fitzgerald and her first and last novel Save Me The Waltz fell through the cracks, becoming out-of-print as the years passed. There’s so much more to cover on her history, but that’s enough for another post entirely.

What I mean to say is this: most of Zelda’s paintings were destroyed by her jealous sister and others were lost with the advent of time.

I guess I’ve been considering how time fragments memories and art as the materials we utilize to create and transcribe our art are so easily damaged, and then in other cases, artists sometimes ask others to destroy their art for them.

In the case of ignorance, millions of records were damaged in the 2008 Universal Studios Fire. (See post on Art Corner page for more info.)

Yet again, in the case of a decisive will, sometimes writers ask someone they love to burn their words for them so the public will never be able to see them again. Emily Dickinson asked her sister Lavinia to burn a chest full of her fascicles and I still think about how Lavinia did what she asked her to do and burned all those poems to this day.

I still think about what it means to lose art. And I still wonder at the distance between recovery and loss in relation to art. Because those paintings and poems are gone to us now and we will never be able to recover them; they smoldered and all we are left with now is these fragments of memory.

A wife.

A woman.

A painter.

A question.

Will you burn this for me?

A poet.

Some words on a crumbling page.

And a memory of loss sometimes captured on the page or in the paint.

I don’t think I understand the connection between recovery and loss yet.

And some part of me thinks I never will.

At My Door

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I think sometimes about how everything I’ve ever lost has returned to me in one way or another and if it was never recovered then it simply wasn’t meant for me.

I lost my gold necklace with my great grandmother’s Hebrew name last night. I scoured my bedroom, went back to the park, searched by the tree I touched, but still there was nothing to be recovered.

I was certain I would find my necklace beside that white stained tree and it would be gleaming golden — victorious, I would be.

But in that moment I realized something. I have a tendency to linger, to hold onto items and memories, which bring me comfort even when they may no longer be necessary for me on my journey.

I’ve come to adopt a life motto, which is extremely simple and it is just this: what is meant for me will never leave me. It will always return to me.

I’ve failed to mention the amount of times I’ve misplaced this necklace, only for it to return to me in the most random place after a realization and a lesson had been learned in divine timing.

So, I think just this time I’ll let it go.

I think just this time I’ll leave this golden memory with the comfort that everything — every person, place, and experience, which is meant for me will never leave me and will return to my door when I’m ready to receive them.

Magic in The Secret Garden

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Front Cover of The Secret Garden, 1911 US Edition

I’ve been thinking about a statement Mary Lennox declares in The Secret Garden. She says to Colin that if he “make[s] them open the door and take [him] in like that it will never be a secret garden again” (Burnett 130).

In the very beginning of The Secret Garden, Mary keeps the abandoned garden she has recovered a secret primarily because she wants to revive it and she witnesses and recalls herself in this piece of earth.

By tending to the garden, she inadvertently tends to herself and becomes less sullen, gloomy, and alone. Mary finds solace in the bit of earth she cares for as she finds solace and a kind of love in herself.

But, I keep returning to this point of the magic in a secret garden or any secret really. I believe Mary didn’t want to share the secret of the garden because she was afraid she would lose herself in being tender and revealing an undisclosed aspect of herself to another — a familiar, a stranger: her first cousin.

When I think of my own life, I often think of the secret smiles I’ve kept to myself — those memories I’ve shared with only another — a memory no one else will be able to recover.

I think that’s what Mary spoke about at the end of the day.

There’s magic in a secret garden. There’s magic in the parts of ourselves we thought were abandoned but then tended to and watched bloom.

And there’s magic in this ancestry and me and you.

Nostalgia’s Rosy Eyes

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Romantic Soul by Ron Hicks

Lately, I’ve been contemplating the role nostalgia plays in our lives as we journey forward through all our challenges and respective triumphs.

I honestly believe nostalgia comes from a desire for safety and comfort. Every time I’ve felt nostalgic in the past, I’ve noticed how the feelings I experience aren’t necessarily a desire to return to the exact time I’m reflecting back on. Rather, these scattered feelings bring me to a place of deep and earnest longing for a time when everything felt certain, warm, and comforting.

Now, in light of the pandemic and the fight/flight responses our brains all are naturally working through, it only makes sense to indulge in nostalgia for a time before the pandemic and before masks and this madness.

Every day, it appears that another area of conflict appears on our door side. Another day equals another conflict —another concern, another worry, which appears insurmountable to even us.

Given this, I’ve been reflecting on why we are nostalgic over the course of our lives. What purpose does nostalgia serve? And why do we linger in past memories through tinted rose-colored glasses?

In the end, I consider nostalgia to be laced in a moment, which never truly existed — a moment when everything appeared to be certain, brilliant, and fulfilling.

And so we return to our childhoods. We return to the playgrounds of our youth. We return to the first kisses, which caught us head over heels. And lastly, we return to the moment before everything unfolded before us.

Because even now we desire to trace the elusive “what-if’s.”

What if I had stayed in his/her/or their arms?

What if I lingered another day in a moment of sustained comfort?

I highly doubt nostalgia will ever leave us, but we might reconsider how we utilize this emotion as we face every challenge in our lives.