Essays

Southern Review cover

"To be visited by such a muse as yourself who writes of that which I know so well is like some sweet dream out of an opium cloud, the kind that eases the pain and forestalls the blues in the night. If I have to receive bad news, then let it come to me in this way. That's what I'm talking about."
--Jim Parks, The Legendary

Creation Story
published in The Southern Review & The Legendary

20 Questions About Bhakti
published in Living In Season

Good Enough To Wait
published in Living In Season

Practicing the French Kiss

Great Mother Prayer
published in Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry & Sacred Stories by Women

Poetic – In the dream where we escape to a chocolate house

  • Artist’s Statement

    As a girl, I lived as much as possible in trees, and I often wandered in an imaginary world, where characters spoke to me, and I could make magic. Later, as a woman, I discovered that both writing and the wild bring me toward truth. Through story-making and story-reading and story-witnessing, I am transformed. Especially those stories that can be witnessed in the wilderness, with our undomesticated selves.

  • I have dual identities – sixth generation Kentuckian raised in Canada; distiller’s daughter and teetotaler; literary writer and screenwriter; city-dweller and wild woman. In my work, I like to explore the dual nature of humanity, and the revelation and liberation that non-dual moments can bring. The sacred paradoxes in sex and food and death remain my favorite themes, for describing paradox is a way of “effing the ineffable,” as the Zen essayist Alan Watts has noted.