Nature & Desire 🦋
write with me on Saturday!
Green is my first true lover
said a dear friend, long ago. We’d made it through a brutal winter up in the Northeast Kingdom, shoveling feet of snow off the porch roof so it didn’t collapse, warming our haunches on the wood cookstove.
For two weeks the temperature hovered at 20 below zero. Not counting “windchill”— a made-up factor laughed off by folks up North. So cold your face hurt. So cold your lungs burned. So cold you forgot the color green and the slow unfurling of leaves and petals.
It seemed spring would never come
but when it did, it was ecstatic. May exploded in verdant glory, fields deep in dandelions, tender green creeping up the hillsides, sunlight on bare skin.
The polar opposite of Stick Season. Noah Kahan, will you write a love song about that?
Come write with me at Word House
It’s lilac season and the vernal energy is building. I’m excited to lead Nature & Desire, a generative workshop for writers of all genres! Everyone is welcome, no matter where you are in your writing process.
We’ll start the day by exploring poems by writers who draw on nature to add texture, intensity, and emotional depth to their work; then we’ll use their lines as prompts to spark our own writing. In a supportive atmosphere, we’ll share our work and receive affirming feedback from the group.
There will be time to sit and dream. Time to savor the natural beauty, woods, and wildflowers surrounding Word House. Time to nurture your creativity. You’ll leave with a cache of new ideas to sustain your momentum 🌱
Write to me with any questions you might have about the workshop.
Or find out more and register HERE.
Here’s a spring poem for you 💚
from my first book, Wanting It.
CHANNELING
I told you May was too much, too much.
Knee-deep in buttercups, I run again
to the mountain, beat a path through drenched clover
to the cut in the trees, that quiet arbor
where woods transform into rainforest,
luxuriant air at skin-temperature
though I am almost skinless. I can feel
the canopy photosynthesizing, green cells
drinking light, making sugar. Sweet ferns
unfurl in a spiral from curled packet to lush frond,
striped maple leaves spread wider than a man’s palm.
Stinging nettles edge the path beside wild geranium
but I slip past unscathed again
to the summit where hunger surprises me, rising
in a fever of chlorophyll and memory,
your hand on my thigh, your words in my mouth
as I lie back on moss and grass open
to the sky. Hot sun burns through cloud
and light, light, light blooms around my eyes,
a tremor spiraling from deep within the body,
leaving my fingers glazed with honey
that smells of rainwater, leaves, mosses and ocean.
If you’ve been curious about Nature & Desire, consider this your sign from the universe. I hope you can join us!
Girl Trouble will be back in June with more musings on mental health, feminist rage, great reads, grief work, writing and not-writing, and more.
Take good care
xo Diana