I didn’t think this loose hybrid micro series would find a home. The pieces felt too small, some too strange and some too colloquial, and all disconnected even though I knew the pieces were connected in a way I couldn’t articulate. I’m gratified and relieved it found a home in Entropy Magazine’s “Fog or a Cloud” series inspired by this quote from Etel Adnan: “… [images] they are pure feeling. They’re like something that calls you through a fog or a cloud.” The editor, Morgaine Baumann writes of the series: “What do you, or we, rely on our memories for? When, or are, memories accurate representations of the past? Does it matter? A little more specifically, I’m thinking, can memories be passed down genetically? Emotional/ physical traces carried from one generation to another, ultimately showing up in our writing? How can this be shown through syntax? In image? If through image, then are the images by extension also what’s being passed down?”

It is a relief to read a call for submissions and see what you’re aiming for reflected, to even understand your work better because of the way the call is framed. It’s a relief to not have much to say about the work itself because it does exactly what it is meant to do.

A last relief: in this and the last series I published in, Burning House Press’ INCOMPLETENESS, I feel in communion with many other pieces in the series. I realized awhile ago that I write to not be lonely but I do often feel lonely in writing spaces, which is far more about me than the spaces. There aren’t yet writer circles which I feel part of, but my writing itself is starting to feel part of a larger mosaic I’ve been aiming for, and that feels like enough for now.

There are five micros in this series: one is based on an anecdote my mother told me, one is about climate grief, one is about crying on my birthday, one is about family lore, and the last I don’t fully understand, but I believe it is about being afraid I can’t be a child’s mother and stay my mother’s child. Please give them a read here.