You self-identify as lifetime practitioner of liberation and social justice. Can you elaborate?

​

My first teachers were nuns and Jesuits. My next teachers were connected to the civil rights movement, the project of challenging the canon, feeding the hungry, freeing people from prisons and debt slavery, and establishing a living wage. If I was smart and certain when young, I would have become a journalist. But I was very uncertain and aware of my ignorance and felt I had some living and learning to do before I could a question posed to me by a very influential writing teacher I met in college. He was encouraging of my early work and what he described as my voice, and wrote in the margins of my final paper in his class, What will you do with it? I really didn't know. So twenty years ago, I started teaching and learning in a vibrant community made up of people that are, by the standards of empire, often dispossessed. The families I work with include immigrants, refugees, survivors, single moms, the sons and daughters of incarcerated parents, of mothers who were five months pregnant when they crossed the border, the brothers and sisters of babies who had died of preventable waterborne illnesses. Who loved and laughed, created and inspired, welcomed and nurtured me with open arms, abundant food, prayers, laughter, music, and faith. I never left. Liberation is at the center of my practice. It always has been. It seems fair to say that this is the task of this moment, and it is my life's work. While the mechanics of imperial empires destroy lives of humans and non-humans alike in the name of power and control, it is imperative that the collective imagination returns regularly to the project of collectively envisioning a way beyond this destruction, into a life of abundant hope and community.

​

 

From your bio I learned that the creator and curator of Breadcrumbs: The Unknowing Project. What is this project and how does it relate to your other work?

​

Breadcrumbs is the blog portion of the author website where I post daily. It began as a challenge to myself in the same year that I was writing Flight Songs. I had just finished my MFA at San Diego State University, the pandemic was still going on and I had been having some modest some publishing success: essays, stories, poems, and interviews in various journals. But I was eager to announce myself in a larger way that felt more sustaining and also immediate. I was hungry to establish a small but meaningful foothold as artist in the world, grappling with the central themes and questions that consume me. Maybe it was a vocational pull, or maybe it was just pride. The work of teaching in a comprehensive public high school can sometimes wear on the soul, and this was one of those times. My first post actually included a solo rendition of "this little light of mine" that I posted on YouTube along with a sort of manifesto about creating and putting it out there.

​

After about a year and a half of daily posts, I noticed that the project had become something larger than "Blog." It had become something central to my practice, a touchstone that returns me back always to a place that in my mind, is a posture of listening, leaning in, and creating from a place of uncertainty. Which is so different from what I had learned growing up. So I decided that the work might expand into a larger umbrella and called it The Unknowing Project, which for now is just a different way of thinking about it for me. But I suspect it wants to become something more. For now, the title  helps me remember what I am about and what I am always aiming toward, which would be much less real to me if it was known.

​

How is the posture of unknowing/ uncertainty central to your practice?

​

My observations, limited as they are, tell me that the need for certainty is definitely part of the pathology of the moment. We all want it, and that's normal, but the thing about living as a human is reckoning honestly with the fact that you don't get to have it. To avoid this, its popular and very good for sales if you can peddle in bravado and false certainty, and people will eagerly follow to avoid having to face something much more mysterious. Once you go there, you're ripe to believe anything a strongman will tell you, and you are likely to profess any manner of ridiculousness ad nauseam for fear of appearing uncertain. And so, look around. This is everywhere.

 

But we are all uncertain creatures of fragile life living in uncertain times. And what is called for now is a kind of faith in the best of what is possible––in love, community, liberation––and one of my favorite teachers taught me that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. That lesson really resonated, and pointed me in the direction that increasingly becomes my whole life. And this understanding has sustained me through some really terrifying personal crises, and part of the pact that I made as I was desperately wading through these was that I would bring what I learned out to others, because it is clearly needed in this moment. I grew up standing in churches between the pillars of my grandparents who had weathered between them war, loss of a child, migration, alcoholism, financial crises, cancer, and the raising of eight healthy children and so many grandchildren I have lost count of my cousins.

 

This influenced the work that followed?

​

Because of this background, I understand The Unknowing Project to be something that runs parallel to the posture of prayer: humble, open, listening, and honest. This is not to say that the posts necessarily read like prayers. I have quite a number that feature conversations I am having with my cat, various monsters, and people on Craigslist. But they are all experiments in listening to the moment at hand, and proceeding with full understanding that whatever comes next will never measure up to the standards of "good enough" that I would have applied if I had any other standard than posting every day.

​

Can you describe your process for these daily posts?

​

I almost never know, when I wake up, what the post is going to be, and I rarely have more than an hour to do them. I started the project on a summer break, so in the beginning I could spend a lot more time on a post if I wanted to (It shows; lots of those early ones are long!), but I knew this wasn't sustainable, so I developed a strict limit of an hour per post, which includes the 15 minutes I may be noodling around sipping coffee and checking emails while I wake up, 15 minutes of reading or journaling while looking for something that sticks, 15 minutes to type it up, and the remaining time to publish, add an image and correct whatever typos I missed the first time around. Then it is time to start preparing lessons and lunches and getting ready for school and whatever manner of chaos the day will bring, and whatever time I can manage in the evening to write needs to be preserved for my "real" projects––manuscripts, etc., which tend to take a while to develop.

 

Does your work as a teacher relate at all to your writing?

​

By this point, it is a central part of my practice. I have been teaching for twenty years, and in the beginning there was this constant tension because if I was writing, I wasn't teaching, and if I was teaching, I wasn't writing, and both made me feel like a constant failure. But over time, I have become aware that my central vocation is neither writing or teaching, per se, but the project of liberation through art and connection. This work extends into all aspects of my life––as a mother, teacher, friend, partner, and ongoing student––and informs and nurtures my writing.

 

I don't mean to pretend that I am in some zen state about it all. I feel perpetually stressed about wanting more time to write. Or breathe. Or sleep. Or parent. Or visit with loved ones. But I know that it is all part of a unified project.

 

Throughout this collection, your poems feature extensive footnotes. In some poems, the footnotes are actually longer than the original poems. Can you talk about this?

​

Sure. This was one of the great discoveries of this collection. I like it so much that it's going to take some restraint not to do it in every collection, for fear that it may become seen as some sort of fetish or gimmick. The first reason was practical. I had a full-length manuscript that I thought was almost ready to go at a time that I saw Finishing Line Press's call for chapbooks. So I cut and cut, and then I experimented with having poems talk back and forth with one another, using footnotes. This was wonderful, as it allowed an easy shorthand for welcoming multiple speakers into the space of a poem.

​

Can you elaborate on how your use of footnotes opens space?

​

Often, the central voice of the poem is an uncertain, besieged person and the answer in footnotes is that of an ancestor taking the long view, encouraging faith. Other times the voice is a non-human entity, like a lemur. Other times, the footnotes can provide context, as they do in the middle section.

​

I first started using footnotes with poems in a project I was doing with Dr. Yetta Howard at San Diego State University. She taught a class on censorship that deeply moved me, especially because I was introduced to the work of David Wojnarowicz. He was pilloried by the Catholic church leaders and others for using twelve seconds of footage involving image of a crucifix covered with ants in A Fire in My Belly, which he created during the ACT UP movement, and it became one of most notorious and least understood films in contemporary art.

 

My understanding of that controversial image, long steeped as I was in the teachings of liberation theology, lit a proverbial fire in me. I thought his use of the image to critique capitalist and imperial engines was perfectly in line with my understanding of the Gospels, and it also seemed tragically predictable that the people to most avidly call for the artist's crucifixion in this case were––as it had been in the original story––leaders of the church. So I created a project that involved the stations of the cross (known as the Via Dolorosa, or "Way of Sorrows") interspersed with narration of oppression drawn from Wojnarowicz's texts. I was completely consumed by these ideas, and generously encouraged by Dr. Howard, to develop a project that became the seed around which Flight Songs emerged. The central image of a persecuted person on the road toward crucifixion as a gateway to redemption and resurrection expands to include a collective body of dispossessed people the world over, across centuries and continents. And the call to recognize this central possibility, as far as I can tell, has never been more resonant than it is now.

​

​

​