A River of Recs & Links
for your almost-spring days
Welcome to Be Where You Are. I’m a writer & writing teacher exploring mindfulness & motherhood & aging & in-between spaces that are awkward, beautiful & kind of magic. If you enjoy this newsletter, if you look forward to it in your inbox, please consider paying a few dollars a month for a paid subscription to help me keep it going. And, if you can’t pay anything, please share it with someone that you think might need it! 🩵
I’ve been living under a pile of books and articles lately and it’s fun and overwhelming. In a normal time, I’m that person who’s forever 20 pages into like 20 books, but now I’m trying to write a nonfiction book proposal (mostly terrifying) and reading into the rich, necessary conversation about motherhood, the body, matrescence, and middle age. Of course, I’m also reading a bunch of books on mindfulness and time, one of which is Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. In it, he suggests that you might “treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket. That is to say: think of your backlog not as a container that gradually fills up, and that it’s your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past you, from which you get to pick a few choice items, here and there, without feeling guilty for letting all the others float by.” So today, I present you with this river of links for reading, listening, and watching that I’ve been slowly gathering like silt on the riverbed for months now. Feel free to treat it like a river or a stream flowing past you and see what you want to choose to take in…
READ
Amy Ray interviewed adrienne maree brown in Orion and I keep thinking about their conversation and the questions they raise: “I think about how many queer people still don’t feel safe being out, and they’re being told, Your belonging is contingent on not being yourself. Belonging is so valuable that they’ll try to risk going without what their body wants and needs, what their soul wants and needs, for their entire life. We have to create an irresistible culture of belonging that says, You don’t have to surrender anything of yourself. Actually, we want all of you.”
I really needed this essay by : “In praise of the bleak, the foreboding, the claustrophobic depictions of motherhood.” I’m bookmarking it for when I inevitably doubt why writing about motherhood and bodies matters: “‘Why does she feel compelled to write such excruciatingly personal stories?’” And so the tradition of adjudicating the memoirist’s life decisions and situating such an adjudication in some vague outline of what memoir should and, perhaps more importantly, should not do, appears once more. This is the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen to male writers.”
Hanna du Plessis’ Bedsores and Bliss is a tiny powerhouse of a book that is changing my life: Hanna takes us into her experience of receiving a terminal ALS diagnosis in her mid-40s, pursuing her MFA in creative writing and trying to live fully in spite of it. Her voice on the page is precise, tender, real and raw. I’m learning so much about the craft of writing and approaching the unknown with courage from this book.
’s piece on “How to Stay Intentionally Informed” resonates deeply and may help you, too: "Don’t feel obligated to the spectacle. Take in less media. Hear your inner voice every week. Notice your body, mind, spirit when you do take in media. Devote more energy and money to that which makes you feel empathic, expansive, and smarter about the world. Devote less to that which doesn’t.”
This piece by Kira Cook at Romper is haunting and beautiful: “The LA Fires Destroyed our Home and Everything In It: Where Do We Go From Here?” “All my children’s drawings, all my children’s first notes. The sea urchin my daughter drew for me that I had taped up next to my pillow — she called it my SEA URGENT. Those hit me the hardest, of course.”
Rebecca Solnit’s newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency, is a grounding force of my survival plan in this moment in our country/world. These Substack newsletters are also keeping me afloat:
’s Chop Wood, Carry Water, ’ The White Pages, ’s What If We Get It Right?; ’s The Examined Family, ’s substack, ’s The Practice of Life, ’s Terms of Endearment, and ’s Letters from a Muslim Woman.I loved this interview with poet Kelly Beeson from Lefty Blondie Press: “How to Approach Poetry as Play.” (ALSO: Lefty Blondie Press’ First Chapbook Award contest’s deadline is March 31st! They welcome poetry chapbook manuscripts by those who: self-identify as a woman or non-binary individual, are 40+ years old, writing in English, have yet to publish a poetry chapbook or full-length poetry book before September 30, 2025. The judge is Stacey Waite! Details/Submit HERE).
My chapbook, FEED, is on sale at Seven Kitchens Press for the month of March for 7$! This chapbook was the seed that became THE FALLS, my first full-length poetry book—which, speaking of motherhood and bodies and ambivalence—gathers my earliest attempts to write into these topics.
LISTEN
& I recently started up The Ass in Chair Collective to get our asses into our proverbial & actual chairs for an hour virtually to write, create, and dig into the things we really want to do. It’s one hour a week when we light the spark and we do it with others, so our energy is collectively amplified. I love it. Here’s our mostly non-worded playlist for your writing and creating inspo. And, here’s the details from our last meet-up. The next one is Fri, March 21st at 12 PM EST. Look for a post this week with the link to register!
My friend Agatha has been holding dance parties in the dark every Sunday morning at 10 am in Ojai. No instruction, just fun. By donation and all $ goes to climate justice. If you can get there, follow her on IG (@afrenchfilm) to get the details. And, if you’re like me and need to dance in your living room, follow her playlists on Spotify b/c they’re incredible.
This Rain in LA playlist my friend Katherine made is a total gem. I feel like it actually summoned some rain after the fires here. My kids hadn’t seen rain since moving here from Pittsburgh last August, and they stretched their hands out through the window and giggled and talked about how much they’d missed it.
Re-sharing my ongoing meditations playlist in case you find something to help ground you in here. Also, here’s a link to some free meditations from the Happier app (my fave place for guided ones).
I’m also listening to The Late Bloomer by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. As someone who runs workshops with women writers who refuse to believe the ship has sailed for their writing—no matter how old they are or how many people have told them implicitly and explicitly that their stories don’t matter—I’m finding so much to learn from here.
WATCH
We finally watched Past Lives! What a stunning slow burn of a film that leaves you reeling and wondering about the roads not taken in your life. It’s the feature debut of Korean-Canadian filmmaker Celine Song, and it not only brings you into multiple love stories and life choices but also evokes so richly the immigrant experience and the feeling of living in two worlds / two pasts / two possible presents.
Primos is by far the new favorite show in our house. The show is about Tater, a high energy, confident, creative, hilarious braces-clad girl in a Mexican-American family, who over the course of one summer, with the help of her 12 primos/cousins, discovers what makes her extraordinary.
Currently re-watching Gravity Falls with my kids and forever in love with Sus (who Nico keeps mistakenly calling Zeus). SUS!!!!
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Be Where You Are is a newsletter about how to use writing and mindfulness to live more fully where you are. If you have ideas to share for future newsletters, you can reach me by replying to this email. I’d love to hear from you! You can also find me on Bluesky or Instagram or find more info at my website. ✨✨
Love the idea of of TBR pile as a river and not a bucket, plucking here and there and letting the rest pass. Incredibly useful (and beautiful) way to think about it.
Wonderful list of treasures, and I am honored that The Practice of Life is among them! Thank you, Emily, deep bows.