Hi, friends. Here I am again, this time to tell you about my upcoming classes in poetry and fiction, and new private offerings in the fall including my class The Only Fact We Have: Writing About Death which is back by popular demand. Because when you give people the opportunity to talk about death…they really want to. That’s around Lesson One I learned when I started doing death doula work. Holy moly, do people crave open convos about talking in a safe space about death. So come join us.
Also, it’s Portal Time of year, so keep scrolling for my take on The Portals.
Sign up for a summer or fall class before the mortal coil springs us all down the stairs (or up? over? yeah, I think I’m going over the stairs) like the strange-ass existential Slinky that it is!
UPCOMING:
6 Weeks, 6 Poems via Grub Street: Mondays starting June 10th, 10:30-1:30PM ET. Remote via Zoom.
Jumpstart Your Novel via Grub Street ON DEMAND (no live meetings): 6 weeks starting June 19th. Asynchronous via the Wet Ink platform.
NEW THIS FALL! PRIVATE CLASSES THROUGH MOI:
It's Poetry Time! Autumn Generative Poetry Group: 8 Mondays starting Sept. 23rd, 12-2PM ET. Remote via Zoom.
And…drum roll please…back by actual popular demand…‘cause who doesn’t want to spend a few weeks contemplating and writing about and maybe even laughing at ye ‘ole mortal coil….
The Only Fact We Have: Writing About Death: 6 Tuesdays starting Oct. 1st, 12-2PM ET. Remote via Zoom.
Now: A note about The Flower Portals
There’s a museum mansion thing called Wisteriahurst in Holyoke that a rich dude once lived in. But that’s not the interesting part of the story. The interesting part of the story is that he apparently loved gardens and covered his mansion in wisteria vines which have sprawled to zillions of feet high and wide.
I’ve a big old crush on the earthly phenomenon of flowers, so despite my Lifelong Life Philosophy of Vegan Except for When I Eat the Rich, I know that wisteria only blooms for a few weeks, and last week I got intel that It Was Happening. I darted on over. The smell of purple was so strong that it wafted all across the gardens like a tripped-out compass needle and when you got up close and stuck your face on into these zillion-foot tall dangling strangenesses, the pollinator sounds were straight-up astonishing in their depth of sound-texture, as if you could actually feel them like a blanket made of electric zap-tickles.
I’ve long wondered if I have some sort of synesthesia that occurs only when I glance flowers, because sometimes when I’m looking at them with other people, they do all not appear to see what I see. Now, perhaps I am identifying too much with a sense of lonely specialness here and people really do all see flowers the way I do. I hope that is true! Or perhaps it’s that I was a bee in a past life. Perhaps it’s because I’m fairly convinced I came through the wrong portal on my way to this birth because I was distracted by spacebirds or novas and—whoooooopies!!!—got sucked into the human realm on complete accident.
Sort-of-tangent:
I’ve always walked around the world like this, with a feeling that I am both completely connected to everyone and everything around me yet simultaneously standing behind an invisible fence that only I can see, waving across it to the other side, unable (or not quite willing) to emerge because I yearn for my home planet. Homesick for another world, to quote Ottessa Moshfegh; it’s not a bad or good thing, per se: It’s lonely but sweet, nostalgia-like, equal parts immersion and dissociation. I’ve always been aware of this line between life and death, between this and that end of the portal. Sitting on the bench in the park staring at flowers as a kid, I looked at the humans—including the damn adults—I’ve never been a huge fan of adults—and known it. There are portals, there are veils. They’re right here. Do you see them? Me, I wear my flimsy gate around me like an invisible hula hoop or a Saturn’s ring or a swinging saloon door; I’ll never know if other people feel this or don’t. This one-foot-out-the-door-where-is-the-opening-to-my-portal-where-is-my-flock-of-spacebirds-thing. If you do, I wink at you wholeheartedly from behind this computer. I see you.
Return from tangent:
But when I see flowers I am absolutely convinced these little weirdos are portals to another dimension. I know how this sounds, but I’m being earnest as hell here. Let me say this another way: The only thing that’s ever elicited a similar quality of color, shape, and invitation that I experience with flowers is when I, uh, let’s just say, took a certain substance and rolled around in a garden and became convinced that I was in that Monet painting with the flowers going “I’m in a painting! Omg, I went…in…to a painting!” (Do not ask my boyfriend at the time about that flower situation because he wasn’t, um, exactly having a great time on said substance that day and his dad worked at the university whose aforementioned gardens I was rolling around in, and thus he was not super happy with me and I afterward profusely apologized for being That Guy.) (Fast-forward to a much less awesome ex who, upon seeing my reaction to a dogwood tree said—and I quote—“flowers are…fine, I guess.” What can I say? Never been famous for my ability to spot a red flag!) But aside from the going inside of a painting, the rest of that experience is how I experience flowers in normal non-altered-state life. I experience flowers themselves as an altered state.
I am not going to try to explain this Portal situation further because it’s one of those “if you know you know, if you don’t you don’t” deals.
At that, I give you a paltry but adequate glimpse of said Wisteria Portals:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
—Edgar Mitchell, a human who spent nine hours on the surface of the moon. I bet Edgar knew about the flower portals, goddess bless his big heart.
til whatever’s on the other side of the veil,
til portals,
love and fierceness and friendship—
<3 carolyn z
My website is here and my Instagram’s at @carolynzaikowski. And if you really like me and wanna buy me coffee, a Bota Box, or a house, I shan’t say no to donations or a paid newsletter subscription: