For adult survivors of child abuse, boundaries are a lifelong struggle. We are taught early that chaos reigns and that anything can and will happen at any time. We alternate between hypervigilance and radical openness, and our wires are so tangled that we often cannot figure out which of these responses is appropriate in the moment. We spend our lives letting the wrong people in, and lashing out at the right ones, until we become conscious of the pattern and begin working to rewire our own brains.
Read MoreAn Interview with Trinity Cross of Field Day & Friends in Oakland, California
I think about the smell of the earth after it rains when I think about wilderness. I think about wild animals. Speaking personally, I am currently trying to figure out a way to get out of the city. So, I think I embrace these things that make me feel like I'm more a part of the earth, through gardening, or through making herbal products, or through doing rituals with the Moon, or different things that I do just to feel grounded and on the actual earth because, living in the city, I feel like sometimes we get so caught up in the grind of just trying to pay our bills, or trying to be a good friend, or trying to take care of our animals, or trying to take care of our other friends who are upset that we lose sight of the fact that we are actually in the wilds. If we collapsed all these buildings and nobody did anything in a hundred years, then it would all turn back to the wilds.
Read MoreBody-Positive & Beginner Workouts for Witches Who Hate The Gym
BY LISA MARIE BASILE
I can think of nothing worse than the gym. Full disclosure: I do GO to the gym. And I hate every second of it. I'm also wickedly allergic to the self-righteous proselytizing of pseudo-yogis and workout buffs who believe their workout is the best workout or that I MUST go Paleo, like yesterday. No, thanks, I'm good. Here's the simple reality: everyone is different in their workout goals and abilities, and everyone likes different things. You may love barre, but I find that shit unbearable. And that's OK!
If you prefer to be reading a book (or writing a book) or casting a spell, you can still get your blood going (so, you know, you stay alive). I rounded up some of the workouts I like because the instructors are down-to-earth and fun to listen to. I also tried to include instructors who are body-positive and forgiving, because if you can't do the high kick, don't do the damn high kick.
Yoga With Adrienne
Adrienne is great because she's calm, chill and encouraging — and she even cracks a few jokes here and there. She's still pretty serious, so you'll learn a lot from her and you'll learn how important it is to do this for you. And her 30-day yoga program is the best.
Blogilates 30-day flexibility challenge
I love Blogilates. Cassey is the most lively, lovely, inspiring woman — and every single video she makes is SO thoughtful and quality.
Seated Workout for People With Disabilities or Injuries
It's so important to remember that working out and ableism often go hand in hand. Here's a great, high-energy workout that people can do in their seats if they have some mobility.
Hip-Opening Yoga class
Jessamyn Stanley is amazing. She's super friendly and she busts misconceptions about yoga, making sure her viewers are comfortable and inspired. She has a bundle plan and an app — and you can get it all here.
KymNonStop's Kickboxing At Home Class
I love this woman! She's really fun to work out with — she keeps your energy high, her workouts are easy to do in a small apartment and she will WORK YOU.
Curvy Fit Club With Ashley Graham
Ashley Graham is incredible — she's been working super hard to prove that size is NOT an indicator of fitness or health. She's strong, powerful and super down-to-earth. All you need here is a low-resistance workout band.
Beginner's Belly Dance Workout
This workout is SO fun. Veena and Neena Bidasha, sisters, show you how to do some basic moves and then incorporate them into a workout. I also included another video I love.
Ab Workout....In Bed
If you're in bed all day and NOT getting up....this is it.
Workout for Arthritis
As someone with an autoimmune disorder that causes arthritis, I know the importance of keeping those knees healthy and strong. This video can help.
Standing Ab Workout with 1 Dumbbell
If you hate to workout and are bored by crunches, this workout is relatively easy and fun.
Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and moderator of its digital community. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, Bustle, Bust, Hello Giggles, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and The Huffington Post, among other sites. She is the author of Apocryphal (Noctuary Press), war/lock (Hyacinth Girl Press), Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Her work can be found in PANK, the Tin House blog, The Nervous Breakdown, The Huffington Post, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center, The Atlas Review, and the Ampersand Review, among others. She has taught or spoken at Brooklyn Brainery, Columbia University, New York University and Emerson College. Lisa Marie Basile holds an MFA from The New School. @lisamariebasile
Inherited Trauma & Memories That Are Not Our Own
BY CARMEN MISÉ
When we first got to this country I was too young to really understand everything that was happening before my eyes. My memories were patched together like pieces of broken glass, glued with stories I would hear my mom and dad recount. I don’t remember the plane ride, or have no memory of my first day in the US. I do remember starting school. My second grade teacher, Mrs. Izquierdo, my bus driver, Manolo, and Yaime, a girl who immigrated the same year we did, and who is still my best friend close to twenty years later. Memory. Isn’t it a funny and mysterious thing? How much of it is it really ours?
Memories, I mean. I feel as though there are people walking around with memories that belong to me. I once heard my best friend recount something that happened on the school bus. She turns to me in utter disbelief that I didn’t remember and proceeds to recount all I said on that bus ride. A memory I clearly did not possess any more, but should have.
Within this complex structure of memory work, I also believe there are memories that have become ingrained in me, not because I lived then, but because they are memories I have inherited. Scientists in Mount Sinai Hospital in New York have noted “the first demonstration of transmission of preconception stress effects resulting in epigenetic changes.” They are calling it “transmission of trauma to a child via what is called “epigenetic inheritance” - the idea that environmental influences such as smoking, diet and stress can affect the genes of your children and possibly even grandchildren.”
This study looked at Holocaust survivors, and while controversial, it is true that genes are modified by our environment all the time. So if it is possible to inherit “a memory” through DNA, then you most certainly can inherit a memory of trauma in other ways, I thought.
It wasn’t until I was in graduate school that I had the words to verbalize what I would later recognize as inherited trauma. In fact, not only the words but the scholarly research of literary professionals who were all saying the same thing, just in different words, regardless of whether they were looking at social injustices in India, Latin America, or Europe. I came to so many realizations as a graduate student, that it’s a wonder I am able to function at all. One realization is this concept of inherited trauma and my memory of soap. Yes. Soap.
For many years my mom would collect the last remnants of bars of soap. The small, semi oval, pieces of soap that once were nutrient rich Dove, Caress or Camey bars. God forbid you threw one out, or let it dissolve and disappear if it fell on the shower floor, by the drain, because you were too lazy to pick it up. This “collecting” was a slow process. Over time, gallon zip lock bags or once I remember a ten pound empty sack of rice, would be filled. Over a period of months, we, my dad and I, but mostly me and my mom, would dutifully fill the container with bits of soap. So much dedication. And with each bit of soap added, a small sense of accomplishment, and a renewed determination to fill it up would drive our drive.
At first I did not quite get it, I just helped. It felt good to help my mom who seemed so determined to collect bits of soap. The colorful array of colors in the see-through bag made it like art project I was only too happy to help reach completion. This went on, without question, for a few years. One day, a day very much like all the others, mundane and ordinary, but special in that it’s on those days when we have our biggest breakthroughs, I asked my mom why she collected bits of soap. She looked at me, and down at the colorful, soap filled bag, after a few moments of silence she said that the soap we saved was going to be sent back to our country. “For what?” I asked. “Para lavar,” she replied. As she explained, I imagined a big tin barrel filled with scalding water, laundry, and the bits of soap I helped collect all this time, and a thick, brown woman, covered in a layer of sweat, standing over the barrel. Detergent does not exist where she comes from. Neither do washers and dryers. Too expensive.
I finally had an answer for something I was doing without question for a few years now. Although I learned to be more careful of the questions I ask, the answers are never satisfying. Surely, she could just buy detergent and sent it over? Or those big detergent soap bars I had seen at la bodega. She could send money too. That’s always an option, I thought. We could walk to the Western Union and while she sent the money I could get a gumball from the gumball machine. I hoped it was a blue one.
Of course, I didn’t understand then that she could not simply buy detergent and sent it over, or just send money. In her mind, what my mom was doing was a continuation of what she had always done, save bits of soap. Just on a grander scale, now that she was in the US and had me to help. When she stopped, I don’t really remember. It wasn't abruptly, but one day, when I realized that I didn’t see bags with soap any more, I knew this had come to an end. Well, at least in that form and at least for her. I, on the other hand, inherited the trauma of not having enough. The trauma of caution. A repugnant feeling in the pit of my stomach when I throw away perfectly good things. I know I am doing wrong and I feel it.
The other day I ran a few errands. I went to the store and I bought a few groceries, along with “un palo de mapear” and you guessed it, soap. As I sat at the kitchen table, emptying out the last quarter of liquid soap into the new bottle, I felt the same feeling of determination and accomplishment I felt collecting bits of soap from wasted bars. And we wonder why we drag with us the history of our ancestors? Why it weighs us down? Why we repeat the same fate over and over? I giggled at myself while I sat there saving the last bit of soap. Had this come full circle? And why was I laughing? Perhaps I was anxious or nervous that I had caught myself repeating this act of trauma. The act of saving the last bit of soap, or detergent, Lysol, olive oil and lotion…. Por si acaso.
Carmen Mise graduated from Florida International University with a Bachelor's in English in 2010 and a Master's in English in 2015. She is currently a professor of composition and literature at Miami Dade College North campus' English and Communication's Department. Carmen was recently invited by the Miami-Dade Public Library System to kick off their Art and Sculpture Lecture Series, where she lectured on the topic of Counter-Monuments. A theory she explored in her master's thesis, and a topic she is still exploring in her writings.
One Girl’s Story of Mistreatment & the Illness that Brought Her There
When I was 19, I had another bad flare up of gastroparesis, a digestive disorder which causes paralysis of the stomach. My flare up was complete with incessant vomiting, inability to eat any food or keep down any liquid, and terrible cramping pains and constipation and bloating. My mom and my adolescent medicine doctor confronted me and insisted that I be admitted to either a psychiatric unit or an eating disorder facility. They assumed that if the typical treatment for gastroparesis wasn’t working, there must be more to it than just gastroparesis. My GI doctor figured I had a lot of psych issues going on along with the gastroparesis so maybe if we cleared up the psych issues I would be easier to treat. He didn’t specialize in gastroparesis and had told us he had never seen a case as bad as mine before.
Read MoreOn Growing Up Christian & the Beginnings of Self-Harm
I guess I was about four and puking in a bucket with a fever of 105, which I heard his mother tell my mother on the phone, and Old Yeller was on. I was trying to throw up quietly because Luke’s dad would be home soon. I tasted a grape chewable. I was crying.
Read MoreOn the Ritual of Downtime & the Oppressive Trappings of Writer's Block & Literary Citizenship
So, there are two types of hunger — the kind that feeds you (life) and the kind that inspires you (creativity). They don't exist alone.
BY LISA MARIE BASILE
Downtime is a divine thing. Downtime as in the purposeful act of taking time off, or the involuntary act of retreat. But it's often treated as creative stagnation. Dead air. Lack of inspiration. Or the dreaded maxim, "Writer's block."
As a writer, I am always in a state; that is, we all are. I am never outside of a condition — especially the conditions that create writing. You know this feeling. If it's not conception, it's development. If it's not development, it's editing. And so forth. But writing — with all of its heart and death, all of its starts and stops — is the same as day and night — which can’t exist without the other.
Yet, we’ve come to burden ourselves with the idea of necessary production. We feel guilt when we aren’t active. We use the phrase "writer's block" as if the natural state is to be a continuous pouring thing; we throw around "writer's block" as if we encountered something that wasn't meant to be there. A cancer. But writing isn't magically exempt from the laws of gravity — up and down, and so forth.
Our light slowly fades when we pressure ourselves too much. When we can't break the 'block', we start to ask questions: What's wrong? Why can't I just use my stress as a catalyst? Maybe I'm not a writer anymore? I haven't published in a year! And like most fools, we rarely imbue the wisdom to know the difference between simply being burned out and burning ourselves out. We are, after all, alive. There are things of money and family and health that sit by, prodding our creative centers, hexing them, lighting them up — or shutting them down.
So, we flail. So many of us aim to “stay in the game” in ridiculously tiresome ways — when we’re not writing, we’re reading. And when we’re not reading, we’re retweeting the statuses of others who are. And we call these things 'citizenship' — we promote these acts — as truth. But we’re constantly a foot in and a foot out because we fear stepping out too far. Would we simply disappear? If we’re not making some sort of noise, does our voice even matter? Is there even a voice at all?
It is the nature of humanity to want to be productive, to give, to make something of our existence. As creators, the impulse is doubly strong; it’s almost divine, irrational. It's like having two bodies — the one we're in and the one that lives in our heads. Maya Angelou wrote, "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Our health — mental and physical — hinges on creating. Our faith, our hope, our livelihoods depend on our creating. We lose a sense of aliveness when we’re not living up to it. Because it is a gift and it must be recognized as such. We’re like sexless animals when we’ve gone without for too long, but even temporary abstinence (both proverbial and literal) has been known to clarify. Sometimes this agony is part of the process.
***
This summer, I was lucky to visit Stresa, Italy, in the Alps. I sat, nightly, at the same bar (in the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromée) Ernest Hemingway sat at in September 1918. He was 19, back from the war, recovering from his wounds. It was in Farewell to Arms that he’d written about the Grand Hotel des Iles Borromées, its enchanting qualities, the same I swooned over. We were both disarmed by the flora of Italy and opulence of this town. But I couldn't figure out what to say. What do you say?
At Hemingway's bar, I took out my notebook; the waitstaff brought me wine and green olives and peanuts, and the pianist played to a room of glass and gold and velvet. I thought, “This is it, this is the time to write!” but nothing came. I forced it, milked it — and it shriveled up: my small, scared, pathetic little voice. Who was I if not inspired by a place so dear to my ancestral self? Why wasn’t I a writer anymore? Where did I go? What the fuck?
Like we say, writing is a gift, but greater gift is to be alive — and perhaps to be in a position that allows us to write and publish freely, to be healthy enough to write, to be privileged enough to buy books, to love ourselves enough to do it.
We are humans before we are writers or artists. And we must feed the humanity in order to do what we do and do it well. So, there are two types of hunger — the kind that feeds you (life) and the kind that inspires you (creativity). They don't exist alone.
So instead of writing at that little bar there — the broken record that I was — I simply let it be. The room enchanted me. There was the elevator with the cherubs atop the door, as if you could ride up into heaven. And the grand lake outside the window, and all its little islands. The way the waiter looked lonely as he refilled our drinks. That was the writing. It didn’t need an act.
***
In the fall of 2014 — so, two years ago — my first full-length collection made its way into the world. For me, it was momentous. The young girl I was — the one in foster care, the one who saw her parents taken by drugs — she was the one who benefited the most. She had survived and turned all that darkness into something else, something honest and lasting. It was exhilarating and validating — but there was this grim dankness hanging over it all. The very act of publishing somehow turned it into something else — this disease of What shall I follow this up with? How soon do I publish again? set in. Another one of my writer friends summed up her post-partum book experience as, "So this is it, huh?"
Years before then, in graduate school, I’d check my email compulsively: Did I get an acceptance? Did I get rejected? My sense of self-worth was irrevocably attached to this idea of producing art — I mean churning, churning, churning — and having it be accepted by some small part of the masses. It made me real. To not be prolific was an insult to my body, my heart, my ancestry, my whole life.
This need to produce, to do more, to get more, to be bigger — is somewhat illusory, isn't it? Success is relative, and often it's defined by parameters that don't sync with the purpose of art. The writing is the core act; everything else is periphery — or should be. Being so focused on the more, more, more can get in the way of the writing. I eventually, in the past two years, got so fed up with the whole idea of producing work and sending emails and doing promo interviews that I stopped writing poetry, stopped submitting, stopped thinking about the whole thing of it.
I’d transmorphed into commodity — and I put myself there! There was a stink of careerism to it, which would have been wonderful if I had let myself be me — instead of the thing I thought I should be. A machine. Because the business of poetry has always eluded me; I am not a natural networker, I don’t care to promote people who I will benefit from promoting and I’m disinterested in popularity. If you've ever talked to me in person, you likely know this.
Eventually, it was all a cycle. My "muses" had abandoned me. I hadn’t let myself stop. Think nothing. Stop doing. I hadn’t let myself live. When I began saying the break was good, healthy _ something that didn’t even need to be defined — the concept of the misanthropic self faded away and became the self that needed a break. To engage with being alive. Watching the success of others was a pleasure. A year in the literary world meant new journals, new writers, new awards, new reading series, new opportunities — and I let them all just be. I didn’t engage. I was happy to disrupt the literary fear-of-missing-out and exist outside of it. I still am.
This doesn’t work for everyone and it’s not a necessity by any means. Everyone has a different process. But when I hear writers say things like, “I suck — I haven’t submitted work in months” or “I feel like there’s so much amazing work out there and I have nothing to contribute,” the impulse, in me, is to say, “that’s OK.” Maybe you aren’t ready right now. Maybe those poems could do with some time. Maybe you don’t need to be always on. Maybe you can enjoy a day at the park as a human. Maybe you're not actually writing your best work when you're trying to send something to every corner of the Internet?
Because work — real writing work — doesn't mean empty work, or keep-up-with-the-Jonses work or work for work's sake. Sometimes a writer works hardest when they're doing nothing at all.
We need time off — from art, from ourselves, from our own trappings. Morning pages and scheduled writing hours and writing groups and workshops all exist to stimulate the writer, but what if we didn’t subscribe to the notion of a solution? What if it wasn’t even known as hybernation? What if we just normalized the nothingness?
***
This past year, the wave broke and I began writing again. It wasn’t a chore nor was it an absolute pleasure. It wasn’t always fruitful nor was it a failure. It was just a thing. A doing.
Eventually, I began writing more and more, but not as a “writer,” just as myself. The knowledge that the writing was my own was freeing; I wasn’t stocking it away or adding to a manuscript. I was just in the art itself.
And there was a distinction, for me, between writing for joy and writing out of compulsory need — but I found myself somewhere right in the middle. It’s as if a sex drive came back. Naturally. Without guilt. Because I had given my mind and body the space it needed without the nagging little fuck me, write me, fuck me, write me voice haunting over me.
On that remarkable freedom of writing for the self, Anais Nin wrote, in On Writing:
That love of living in the moment brought me tremendous healing. It validated me more than any set of publication credits could have, as claptrap as it sounds.
What had I learned? Three things — 1) that the process was so much more authentic when I wrote for myself, 2) that the result — my work — was so much more thoughtful than the factory line poems I could have churned out because some journal happened to have an open reading period and 3) that writers must value their non-writing time.
To be satiated with — or to embrace — a state of downtime is, in some sense, an act of revolt. To quiet and listen, or to not listen at all, to refuse to play by the rules, to not be led by praise or artifice— and to instead be motivated by simpler means — is a radical act. It is not easy. It may not even be necessary for everyone. But for those who have trouble disconnecting from the rules, for those who can’t find a lit path back to sincere creative energy — it may be worth it to say, “Fuck it. It’ll happen when it happens.”
Lisa Marie Basile is the founding editor-in-chief of Luna Luna Magazine and moderator of its digital community. Her work has appeared in The Establishment, Bustle, Bust, Hello Giggles, Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and The Huffington Post, among other sites. She is the author of Apocryphal (Noctuary Press), war/lock (Hyacinth Girl Press), Andalucia (The Poetry Society of New York) and Triste (Dancing Girl Press). Her work can be found in PANK, the Tin House blog, Spork Press, Best American Poetry, PEN American Center, The Atlas Review, and the Ampersand Review, among others. She has taught or spoken at Brooklyn Brainery, Columbia University, New York University and Emerson College. Lisa Marie Basile holds an MFA from The New School. @lisamariebasile
Gift Ideas for the Mystic in Your Life
If you have a magical person in your life (maybe it is you!) and they love all things beautiful and mystical then below are some aesthetically hypnotizing lovelies and aromatic goodies that they (or you!) will swoon over this winter.
Read More28 Perfect Gifts for the Literary Witch
28 gifts that say "you are magical."
Read MoreHow I Changed the Way I Take Care of Myself
But writing that status changed the way I think about the concept of taking care of myself. I wrote it because I needed to give myself permission to "indulge." That day was the first Saturday morning I’d had to myself in months, and although there was a whole list of fiddly little things I could’ve done—emails about my upcoming move, groceries, phone calls to several doctors and to insurance company—I didn’t want to do any of it. So I nestled into my bed, opened my computer, and wrote that status in second person, telling everyone I knew that they had permission to stay in bed so that I could have permission to stay in bed.
Read MoreWitchy World Roundup - December 2016
Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (2016, ELJ Publications), & Xenos (2016, Agape Editions). She received her MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, as well as the managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM. Some of her writing has appeared in Prelude, The Atlas Review, The Feminist Wire, BUST, Pouch, and elsewhere. She also teaches workshops at Brooklyn Poets.
Read MoreCan I Be Queer in the Office?
Queerness poses a special problem in the office because it’s about more than just being different. It stands as a disruption to a complacent "normal" that’s all too filled with sexist, racist or classist underpinnings. The corporate workplace seems to be predicated on a uniformity of style and sense of productivity. Does success in that corporate realm come at the expense of queerness?
Read MoreHow Have I Survived this Long on Planet Earth?
You’re gone, which is fine. After I dropped you at the airport on Sunday I went home. I felt pretty proud of myself for hanging up all of those fancy prints and artwork we’ve collected over the past few years. It sorta felt like I was my mom up there, standing on your recliner with a hammer. I had chicken in the crockpot. It was nice.
Read MoreMaking Mermaids: The Beautiful Politics of Bath Time
Taking a bath is something that most women don’t do often enough. I’m not talking about getting clean, I’m talking about taking the time to draw yourself a bath. As little girls, we’re always taking baths, but when we get older, we start to see bathing as a superfluous thing.
Read More