JUNE 2013In June I was still feuding with my family, and I had...

JUNE 2013

In June I was still feuding with my family, and I had to find a place to live pronto. I stayed with Miles for awhile, but his roommates (a “community organizer” dude and a woman who devotes her career to helping women who’ve experienced trauma, lol) refused to let me contribute rent and live with them until I could find my own spot. It was a slap across a face that had just been burned. However, the poetry community really came together to support me and helped me build an impromptu poetry tour and crash on couches in the Midwest and Northeast. I visited Pennsylvania, Ohio, Upstate New York, and Maine and read poems and sold books and gave all the hurt away each night. I also attended The Pink Door Women’s Writing Retreat and Good Idea Summit at Rachel McKibbens’s house where I tented out in her backyard with about 40 other women writers, wrote and drank rose-infused vodka and danced with a five-year-old and took workshops and made new friends. All of these things restored my faith in humanity that those other people tried to snuff out. And then I found out that I won the Write Bloody Competition, and that they were going to publish my second book! The universe has a way of working itself out, I guess. Balance.