Try not to pay too much attention to what other people are doing. Read the books and take in the work that calls to you, but make what you feel like making. Don't try to fit into the culture -- listen to yourself. And have patience. Take the time to figure out what you mean and how you want to convey it. That was so hard for me at the beginning. It still is sometimes. I think in this moment especially, it can feel so urgent to create and to make something of yourself, to constantly respond. And in some ways it is urgent, but resisting that urgency can be its own important gesture. I'm always re-learning that.

Writing and art making have been ESSENTIAL to helping me navigate grief and my mental health. For many years this was the primary energy behind my work -- writing was a place I could go to try to understand loss and to heal from it, a container to pour into when my mind was out of balance.

As I've gotten a little older and have moved through some of that, my writing is turning more toward exploring my family and how its histories have affected my life and development. That's the present focus, at least. I also find that writing and performance are some of the best ways I've found to participate in my life, to really engage with it and make meaning. I think I'd have a much less robust understanding of existence without them.

It was incredible to get to think about a whole wall -- to reorient how I think about language to fit a single, large space. It caused me to relate to words as a raw material in a way that I haven't before. I'll take that with me.

I think this type of project creates an opportunity for folks who care about this place to affect the shape it's taking. It's neat to get to be part of that process and to work in a different way than I usually do. And to have poetry represented in these murals also feels important -- getting people to engage with it who might not usually be open to that is really exciting to me.