it's SUMMER! (🍒/💌/🎤/🦕/🚀)
in which everything changes again, the way it always does
🍒 A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING AND EVERYTHING » Before the party, I go out to pick cherries. Well, no — I go out to survey the riotous, summertime green around our house, clippers in hand. The plan: a bouquet. My housemates have been preparing since the night before, and our fridge is brimming with marinades and dipping sauces, grillables nestled in brown butcher paper or in tidy skewered lines.
Inside and out, there is so much richness everywhere this time of year. Birdsong in the mornings, air sweet with the smell of things growing. Leggy ox-eye daisies, the last of the imposing pink foxgloves, the delicate purple flowers of the pungent-leaved (and many-named) stinky geranium. None of these will last long in a vase, but lasting isn’t the point. Today is to be, amid so much grief and pain in the lives of so many we know and so many across the globe, a celebration. This moment in time — the golden Strawberry Moon; the summer solstice; the fragile, enduring joy of being able to gather with and care for people you love.
Still, the cherries come as a surprise. Usually by this time of year they’re all but gone, picked over by the birds and the daredevil squirrels that shimmy face-first down the branches. But this tree is still bright with clusters of sun-warm, perfectly ripe fruit, branches nodding in the breeze.
I move from branch to branch, filling my little plastic bucket. The same springiness that challenges the squirrels means all you have to do is grasp a branch and pull, gently, and fruit that seemed impossibly high a moment ago is suddenly within reach. The tree is strong; it is built for this kind of tension, this stretch and release. Let go, gently, and the tree returns the branch aloft, as steady as the rest.
What a gift to be reminded that nourishment is right here, growing just because. That the tree bends in exactly the way my human strength is prepared to handle, that the birds and squirrels shy away from the places I am most capable of reaching, while they will harvest from the parts of the tree I cannot. The bees in the long grass, the cows in the valley below. The hawks and turkey vultures on their circle-paths high above, soaring. All of us about our lives on this day after the longest day of the year, abundance all around.
💌 UNTIL IT SHOWS » The summer solstice also marked my graduation from the Independent Publishing Resource Center Poetry Portfolio Program! I applied out of curiosity about what would happen if I really gave poetry my full self for a while, and am leaving the program 10 months later steadied and challenged and changed. And so proud! Of seeing this commitment through, of my incredible cohort, and of my final project, until it shows, a collection of eight poems that I also designed, printed, and assembled into its final form (above) — a whole new world of making for me that I’m excited to keep experimenting with for future projects.
I have a few copies left of my first edition, and am planning on a second printing as well. If you would like an early heads up when copies become available for sale, please comment below (&/or hit reply if this came to you via email) and I’ll make sure you’re among the first to know!
(p.s. If you’re local to PDX and interested in learning more about any of the 2024-2025 Portfolio Program tracks, applications for poetry, comics, art books, and prose have just opened! The IPRC is an incredible organization that truly walks the community-oriented talk, and continues to require masking for all of their spaces + events — cannot recommend them more).
🎤 JUKEBOX » Last I wrote you, the Kickstarter campaign for Lyla McBeath Fujiwara’s musical TTRPG Jukebox: the Karaoke Musical Tabletop Role Playing Game was almost upon us. Thanks to the incredible generosity of everyone who backed the project, we funded at 600% (!!) of the original goal — which means that I and the rest of the stretch goal writer team were funded to contribute supplemental material to the core game! My playset is called One Last Job, and it’s all about pulling off the heist of a lifetime while (of course!) singing your heart out. You can read more about my playset and its high-octane inspirations here, and preorders for the full game are now live as well!
🦕 PANGAEA PALS » My educational game Pangaea Pals has been selected for publication in the upcoming Roll for Learning, a free, open-source anthology of short TTRPGs designed for classroom use! Pangaea Pals is a journaling game about dinosaurs for middle grade folks + up that teaches foundational research skills through imaginative play. More details to come!
🚀 ITP » This letter may have begun with an update from the Oregon woods, but I am actually writing you from somewhere many biomes and time zones away: my new home in Brooklyn, NY, where I’m gearing up for my first year of grad school! I’ll be starting in just a few months at NYU’s interdisciplinary, creative tech-focused Interactive Telecommunications Program. Every student’s path through the program is unique, so even I don’t 100% know what’s in store at this point; right now, I’m most excited to spend more time exploring experience design, game-making, and technological interventions that uplift real connection instead of dissociation. For more about the program and all its different permutations, I highly recommend checking out past student projects — and I’ll of course keep you posted on whatever comes next as this new adventure gets underway. :)
until next time —
❤️ devan