Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents “Writing Around the Wound of Estrangement”

Promotional Image

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing Around the Wound of Estrangement,” a workshop led by Lindsey Danis on May 10, 2023, from 6-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

This 90-minute generative workshop will look at how we talk about estrangement and, more critically, what is left unsaid. We’ll examine the landscape of estrangement: Why do relationships fracture? Who is primarily affected? Whose voices are elevated in discussions of estrangement, and whose are silenced? We’ll use Jane Alison’s “Meander, Spiral, Explore” to consider the narrative shapes best suited to estrangement stories. What structures explain what often feels untranslatable? How do we give meaning to this wound when it requires we write about painful material, regrettable behaviors, or family secrets? We will read excerpts from Cheryl Strayed and MB Caschetta to unpack the narrative choices writers make, and what we believe this wound reveals or conceals about us. Generative writing prompts will allow writers to examine this topic in a supportive group environment. Writers will be encouraged (but not required) to share.

Picture of Lindsey Danis

Lindsey Danis is a queer writer of fiction and essays on travel, nature, belonging, and LGBTQ identity. Lindsey’s writing has appeared in Longreads, Catapult, Hobart, Barzakh and elsewhere, and received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. Lindsey is the creative nonfiction editor at Atlas + Alice and runs the queer outdoor travel blog QueerAdventurers. Lindsey has a BA from Vassar College, MFA from Emerson College, and is an alumni of SAFTA, Tin House and forthcoming TA at The Writer’s Hotel. Explore more of Lindsey’s work at lindseydanis.com or via Twitter (@lindseydanis) or Instagram (@lindsey.danis.writer).

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Lindsey Danis via Venmo: @Lindsey-Danis or via Paypal: lindsey.danis@gmail.com

This workshop is brought to you in part by a grant provided by the Tennessee Arts Commission. Find out about the important work they do here.

Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents May Poetry Xfit

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present Poetry Xfit hosted by  Emory Night. This generative workshop event will take place on Sunday, May 21 from 2 to 4 pm EST via Zoom. Join us at the link tiny.utk.edu/sundress with the password “safta”.

Poetry Xfit isn’t about throwing tires or heavy ropes, but the idea of confusing our muscles is the same. You will receive ideas, guidelines, and more as part of this generative workshop series in order to complete three poems in two hours. A new set of prompts will be provided after the writers have written collaboratively for thirty minutes. The goal is to create material that can be later modified and transformed into artwork rather than producing flawless final versions. The event is open to prose authors as well!

Emory Night is a queer author from East Tennessee. They are currently a senior at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and are working on getting their bachelor’s in creative writing. They have worked as an intern for both Sundress Publications and SAFTA. They have been published in The Phoenix, a literary magazine at the University of Tennessee. During their free time, you’ll find them hanging out with their cats, playing Dungeons and Dragons, or playing video games.

Thank you to the Tennessee Arts Commission for making this event possible. Find out more about the important work that they do here.

While this is a free event, donations can be made to the Sundress Academy for the Arts here.

Each month we split any Xfit donations with our community partner. Our community partner for May is the Tennessee Equality Project. The Tennessee Equality Project (TEP) advocates for the equal rights of LGBTQ people in Tennessee. TEP do this through legislative advocacy– meaning they lobby the Tennessee General Assembly and local governments around the state. When there is an important federal issue, like anti-LGBTQ adoption issue language in legislation, TEP helps make your voice heard with your federal officials.

The TEP Foundation provides a variety of educational and organizing programming. They have registered 353 voters online since October 2017. TEP provides workshops called Advocacy 101 across the state so that more people can engage their elected officials. They monitor and analyze state legislation related to the LGBTQ community, gather stories about the impact of state preemption of local government and provide public education on the issue, and hold Boro Pride in Murfreesboro annually, which now attracts over 4000 participants. Their Tennessee Open For Business program recognizes companies that do not discriminate against their employees or customers on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Learn more about the work the Tennessee Equality Project does here!

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh

This selection, chosen by guest editor Alyse Bensel, is from Faraway Places by Teow Lim Goh, released by Diode Editions in 2022.

Faraway Places

Desire makes us face ourselves. The selves
we keep at bay want to break out of our bodies.

I wonder if the saying that women cannot read maps is meant
to keep us from venturing out on our own.

Maps are guides to our dreams,
where we want to go and who we want to be.

I heard a crack that sounded
like a thunderbolt, but it was not the sky.

Dust blows in the wind to faraway places, washed
out to sea and rolled back to shore.

Maps hold the stories of our lives, a record
of journeys into the unknown.

I leave it for the waves to reclaim, the sand to fill,
the hole I make in my wake.

Teow Lim Goh is the author of two poetry collections, Islanders (2016) and Faraway Places (2021), and an essay collection Western Journeys (2022). Her essays, poetry, and criticism have been featured in The Georgia Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, and The New Yorker.

Alyse Bensel is the author of Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian (Green Writers Press, 2020) and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Cream City Review, South Dakota Review, and West Branch. She serves as Poetry Editor for Cherry Tree and teaches at Brevard College, where she directs the Looking Glass Rock Writers’ Conference. 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier

This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier, released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

The Plant’s Eye

This is speculation I know but
idol flowers have always born
our mean-making scissors

Consider scissors nature’s trope
deploying astonishing devices

The pitcher
marooned and white
not attractive unless

you reinforce the species
w/ a question of mimicry
intended to scare Victorians

An arc of corseted breasts
crowned w/ clitoria

Consider an insect
evolved to conceive
as female and male

captivatingly from behind
A frenzy of intercourse

ensures pollination
Our factory is olfactory
tactile attention not just to

simple chemicals
signals so far as creatures are things
to secure pollination or a meal

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, and Sunspot.

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.

Sundress Reads: Review of Ain’t Life Grand

Sundress Reads black-and-white logo with a sheep sitting on a stool next to the words "Sundress Reads." The sheep is wearing glasses and holding a cup filled with a hot drink in one hoof and holding an open book in the other.
The cover has two blue grey booklet with the words "ain't life grand" typed out on the cover. The "l" in "life" is a long line from top to bottom. The author's name "edie roberts" is on the top booklet. A tree branch is on top of both these booklets. They are all on a light grey background with a light coming from the top.

In edie roberts’ Ain’t Life Grand (pitymilk press, 2020), the seething fury of radical youth boils just under a cooled, jaded, midlife critique of contemporary America. roberts pinpoints the surprisingly complex feelings of seemingly normal, bureaucratic experiences, such as going to the doctor and riding on the bus, and delivers them as hot, little coals of poems. In the condensed space of the chapbook, they touch on a heavy range of subjects: healthcare inequality, environmental disaster, hostile architecture, and familial anguish. Ain’t Life Grand begins with a dying cat and ends with a mountain of garbage, and in between, roberts files away the personal, political, and defyingly beautiful events that define our lives. 

“We were never meant to survive,” writes Audre Lorde in the book’s epigraph, and indeed, at first, it does not seem like anyone will. A dense pessimism begins the collection. The cat who cannot “find a comfortable spot / to wretch and foam / convulse then quit” in the first, eponymous poem becomes a framing metaphor for the physical and emotional separation between people imposed on us by a brutal, capitalistic culture. roberts uses a diction almost violently terse and direct to discuss this separation. In “I am going to the doctor in America,” the nurse’s touch is “like a sterile mother / who can’t assure you of anything.” Within the illogical and inhumane healthcare system, marrying a Canadian friend for medical coverage might be the only logical option for a cancer diagnosis.  

Despite the curt bleakness, an underlying attachment to the beauty of life runs through this book. In “Any Greyhound station bathroom,” roberts is “endeared / to every person / in here.” Their struggle to connect despite the bench separators provides a common resistance. That Canadian friend they “love / in a dear and tender way.” Even the human-made terrors have a kind of resigned beauty. In “The gulf is on fire,” the “cellophane / was let to ride / the hungry wind,” which in a way makes it more free than we are.

But beauty alone does not excuse these environmental and societal ills. With language like a staring contest, daring you to look away, roberts calls out their villains. “If people in America / really gave a shit / about babies / They probably wouldn’t have them / Because they don’t have shit to give them / except a mess so big / that the people who are already alive in America / can’t do anything / but ignore it.” And ignoring problems is the central crime of the book. They call out the “woman who seems to think / thinking good thoughts and / having hope / about the future / is all we can do.” Ignored problems pile up. Even the poet is culpable. “[T]hey all knew about / where the / world was going…We built this mountain / in 15 years / You can smell it for miles.”

Yet, there is some hope in Ain’t Life Grand. There is a dream of “some real estate / in the stars / where no one works / for pennies and / gets chased by / debt companies.” There is a sense that “I am / doing a bad job / trying to stay alive / and living at the same time” because we have been asked to live in an unreasonable structure. But hope, like ignorance, is a choice to be made by each individual. “I need things to look forward to,” writes Roberts, “or the future is a numbing jelly.”

Ain’t Life Grand is available from pitymilk press

Robin LaMer Rahija (she/her) did her MFA in poetry at the University of Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Guernica, and elsewhere. She is an Editorial Intern at Sundress Publications. She loves books, trees, and Excel documents.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier

This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier, released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

For the Least Dead Brains

These synthesize molecules

These design brains

Animals sometimes attract a flower
So a hummingbird slips her tender tongue from her hovering
needle-like bill

But often animals repel
even destroy outright

flowers/ poisons
lick frogs’ viscous skin

Here—one species of hairy prick because a powerful-death-dealing
      selective-
predator eyes
the great evolution of pesticides

Designed to kill is rendered better to repel/ confound/ cancerous facts
to expand the astounding

earning potential

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, and Sunspot.

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier

This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier, released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

Pressed Against This Smart Glass

Happen to find yourself a particular afternoon notice a makeshift
	craft
floating through the narrow and bounded by steep shoulders
	waterway

Notice fairies harnessed/ boiled a ramshackle armada of miracles
	from the comparative wilderness caught that afternoon
care evidently distrusting the order ‘wanted alive’

Hollowed out logs lashed to a skinny man w/ a burlap sack deemed
	to be snoozing
A rent in the net under the weight of streams blanketed with moss

The sun already knows my nickname
An arrow shot clean through my ribs
Clock fragmented clots of day

plan/ plant/ drain the fertile forest hills
The wilderness riding me
out across out of print autobiography

w/ a resonance of mathematics learned bargaining sharply
for apples can tease murderers and settlers to domesticate the frontier
	with old world exotics

Disparagement might return a golden habitat
an emblem of marriage
from man’s peculiar craft

Passengers point at a sign
working for food
waiting for the bumblebee to wake up to hover among wide eyed

We give credit the power domestication represents
take to dance
Generations assume naive scenes
Animals sit it out

Nutritious acorns buried any arrangement with us long before
boatloads dependent on bank territory or at least the folk hero
	I figured

Modest our orchard or/
our childlike wishful/ wistful thinking
how lost

We accept fate in the tang of strangeness sweetened beyond
	recognition
a blemish free plastic dimension
one all-purpose-single-use-just-as-described-cheap-fake-sugar
	substitute for the strong desire to
	live to

lounge in queerness
with no address
Hallow defiance
a night swim

a vegan frontier
do you mind
to ride a horse or punish a worm

Children are not rumors

For some cis-godfearing-rapist-white-men emphasis relies on their
	dress/
color of skin/ mitigation/ migration/ maps

Some far flung account/ song led to the river
the reality and the pipe littered behind

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, and Sunspot.

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier

This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier, released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

Help a Hundred Billion Honeybees Powder Their Thighs

Fact is we’ve been aware of indifference to the flower taking part in
every being

As acorns witness somewhat self-centered angiosperms move freely
trial and error find the best way to induce mater by playing

Or flowers manage to choose the exact moment seduced
off its knobby charms

Clever purposeful fungus conceives
of rotting meat

We care about making copies
Cost and taste make us mortals risk covid for a burger and fries

Time and location select countless generations
Design and catenation are culled by miracle

Trivial semiconscious evolution insists
as this novel strain mounts deaths

a token inventing/ insider/ outlaw contingent desires apparel and
impunity

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, and Sunspot.

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.

Meet Our New Intern: Zoe Sweet

Zoe Sweet

I grew up in a really odd technological age with a traditional family. There were a lot of rules surrounding technology for me. I would only be able to watch TV at night with my family. I could watch Saturday morning cartoons. I was not allowed a computer in my room until I begged for it and proved I was responsible. And I was not allowed a phone until high school. All these rules seem like a lot today, but 20 years ago when I was born, they made sense.

I remember being young and so jealous of all my friends who could watch TV whenever they wanted for as long as they wanted, the ones who had iPads and unlimited screen time, and the ones who had no rules surrounding the technology. 

When I reached a certain age, though, I stopped being envious and was glad that my parents pushed me to do well in school and refrain from letting technology take over my life. I am now in college and have unlimited screen time, and I no longer doubt the phrase, “It will rot your brain.” I have seen what it has done to my peers, and, unfortunately, me as well. I am happy that my parents introduced me to the concept of reading and writing when they did, because they unknowingly shaped me. 

My friends got in trouble for staying up late on their phones while I was getting in trouble for sneaking a book and a flashlight to read under my blanket. Books became a safe space for me, just like they have become for so many before me, and hopefully after me. I was in a new world, a world where I went to school with Junie B. Jones, where the B stands for Beatrice. I went on adventures in a magic tree house where I saw the world and tried to not interfere. I traveled around the world and saw everything that I still one day dream of one day seeing. I met my idols–Hermonie Granger, Tris Prior, Asher, Katniss, Sherlock Holmes, and so many more. I lived the life that I always wanted to.

I am who I am because I lived in a world of books. I focused on always wanting to learn more. I pushed myself everywhere I could. I am now a junior in college pursuing my dreams. I am studying political science so I can eventually go to law school and become a judge. I am also studying English, so I can make the little me inside me happy by discussing and reading books every day. I am interning here at SAFTA, so I can have an outlet where I write and interact with those who are making the books that future little girls will be reading under their blankets. 

I am one to take every opportunity that comes my way. Life is truly what one makes of it. I have been able to travel to another country to teach English to children, to volunteer in prisons to help inmates get their GED, and to plan and run events with multi-thousand dollar budgets, all while working to pursue my education. Sometimes I feel that my life is a book that I would have loved to read as a child. A book about a young girl who does everything she can despite so many obstacles. A book filled with adventures and a plot twist at every corner. 

I’ve been really lucky in life. I have a family who pushed me to read and write and use every part of my brain. I have friends who challenged me to do more and be the best version of myself. And I have books. Books that opened my eyes to a world on paper that I could step into whenever I felt alone.

Zoe Sweet is a writer, editor, and intern located in Chester, PA. She serves as the editor of Widener Ink, Widener’s literary journal, writes for The Blue and Gold, and is an intern at SAFTA. She is currently studying Political Science and English with hopes of one day being a judge.

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier

This selection, chosen by guest editor Samantha Duncan, is from In Our Now by Valyntina Grenier, released by Finishing Line Press in 2022.

In Our Now

ordinary vision
is a hinge
crowded with flowers

busy/ multifarious
It feels like a city
In a quiet corner

a confusion of color and scent
is set to a railroad of insects
A carnelian dragonfly hovers to rest

after taking a turn on
our eye
Our eye?

All of the potential pollinators
Old roses leave behind
waded tissue

Inebriated anemones
are dining and humping
Trashed lilies lean in

Accept the invitation
into their throats of nectar
Afterward punch the air

Valyntina Grenier is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, AZ. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche, Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). You’ll find her work in Beyond Queer Words, Genre: Urban Arts, Impermanent Earth, The Journal, Lana Turner, The Night Heron Barks, Querencia, Ran Off with the Star Bassoon, and Sunspot.

Samantha Duncan is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including Playing One on TV (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2018) and The Birth Creatures (Agape Editions, 2016), and her work has appeared in BOAAT, SWWIM, Meridian, and The Pinch. She lives in Houston.