YES CHEF
People in love are bananas
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Lately I have been thinking about work—what it demands, what it gives, how it shapes a life.
I am a writer and a diviner. This is my work. It makes my life very full.
I love my work. I desire my work. I am obsessed with the project of working. I am in love with it. People in love are bananas.
When I think about how I am centering my work now (no longer through academia), I ask myself: What does it mean to build a temple, then move into it and live there?
Much of my work, in recent years, has turned toward the topic of work itself: training teachers, diviners, and practitioners of various sorts to experience their work in more significant ways.
Below is a notebook entry I wrote five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic during a time when my work life felt very different than it does today.
At the time, I was working as a director in a creative writing PhD program. I wrote this entry after turning to the cards and asking for a strategy that might help me fall back in love with my work. For I had begun to loathe my work.
I say so—even as I loved teaching, believed in the ethos of the program I directed, cared about my students and their work, and remained fully invested in the power of art through doctoral mentorship and cross-degree teaching.
There are various reasons why I fell out of love with my work: it felt wrong to keep recruiting doctoral students into a system that paid them poverty wages for their labor, and for an institution that again and again would choose against their best interests—or: the gendered division of labor issues in my department had absolutely flattened me after 18 years—or: even though I was the only woman and only queer to be ranked at Full Professor, I was continually passed over for raises and grants despite outstanding performance reviews—and so on.
That day when I consulted the cards with a broken heart, a two-part framework emerged.
I followed this framework, and the result was a small, potent piece of writing, a text I imagined in the shape of a lucky knife, an image I carried inside me.
I admired the knife but a knife can cut and in the end this text did open me.
The text - a kind of letter to myself - was an opening that allowed me to see the discrepancy between the inside of my life—my felt interior reality—and the outside—my actual lived experience. The gap between the inside and the outside was considerable. The text I generated became a blueprint for reimagining my work.
Rereading that entry now (shared below in full), I’m struck by how it doubles as an outline for my class, The Work Reset. These were truths I reached for then, and they are truths I celebrate still.
If you are interested in experiencing a framework to help you reorient towards the heart of your work, read more here - enrolling now 💘
If you enjoy this work, an easy way to show support is by giving us a 🖤 Thanks!
Notebook Entry (2020): A Letter to Myself Regarding Work
Remember that naming the unspoken conditions that sabotage your work is itself a form of repair.
Staying with the pulse of your work keeps it from being flattened by all forms of tyranny.
Remember that the differences between exhaustion and devotion are good to understand.
To reset is not to fail or retreat, but to locate a deeper entrance into the work.
Remember that to attune to the rhythms that make your work move is to safeguard its joy.
An interior vow able to steady the hand in the presence of despair is a good companion.
Remember that it is not enough to survive, you gotta flourish.
A contract with yourself is a binding form of protection.
Remember that to have trust in yourself is the ground of your authority.
Trust restored after the slow erosion of self-doubt is self-sovereignty.
Remember that sovereignty is not located in elite isolation or any progress narrative but is found in the courage to remain present.
Authentic authority is not a performance but a homecoming.
Remember that authority, when inhabited without domination, becomes a sanctuary for the self and can uplift others.
To serve well is to stand as witness to another’s dignity.
Remember to say and say so often: I will not abandon myself outside these temple gates.
A PROGRAMMING NOTE 🎵 ✍️
Once a year or so, I open a three-month writing circle for serious, committed writers with a work-in-progress (creative prose of all kinds, including hybrid forms). Many published books have grown out of these spaces.
The experience is both rigorous and a pleasure, a space of work and good company. Throughout, writers receive tailored mentorship and detailed feedback through 1:1 sessions with me, alongside group workshops designed to strengthen their projects and expand their practice.
We also read widely, look at art, listen to field recordings, and make non-writing things as a way to evolve our skills and deepen our sense of composing (writing/making) as a site of encounter and radical potential.
This three-month framework has been designed and curated with tremendous care, an approach refined through twenty-five years of teaching creative writing in both graduate programs and community spaces around the world.
The circle is limited to 7 participants and we have a few spots remaining.
If you’d like to learn more, please email fourqueensdivination@gmail.com with Writing Circle in the subject line.
You can learn more about my books here and a few recent interviews, here and here. Thanks! 🌻 Selah
